Bouquet's Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764 by William Smith

By The Kent State University Press

In the fall of 1764, Col. Henry Bouquet led a British-American army into what is today eastern Ohio with the intention of ending the border conflict called “Pontiac’s War.” Brokering a truce without violence and through negotiations, he ordered the Delawares and Shawnees to release all of their European and Colonial American captives. For the indigenous Ohio peoples, nothing was more wrenching and sorrowful than returning children from mixed parentage and adopted members of their families, many of whom had no memory of their former status or were unwilling to relinquish Native American culture.

Provost William Smith of the College of Philadelphia wrote a history of these events in 1765 titled Bouquet’s Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764. Subsequent editions and printings appeared in London, Amsterdam, Dublin, and Paris until 1778, making this book the most widely circulated and read work on warfare and diplomacy in the Ohio country to emerge following the Seven Years’ War. The literary reputation and impact of Bouquet’s Expedition surpassed all similar contemporary works published on either side of the Atlantic and is probably the most prominent description of an Indian captivity narrative available from the eighteenth century. The dramatic return of the captives described by Smith inspired Conrad Richter’s 1953 novel The Light in the Forest and the Walt Disney movie of the same name in 1958.

This fully annotated edition of Smith’s remarkable book, drawn from all the 1765–1778 versions, includes a new introduction with essays on Smith and his contributors and sources, such as Bouquet, Benjamin Franklin, and Edmund Burke, in addition to a new history of the publication. Numerous eighteenth-century images, sketches, drawings, engravings, and paintings are reproduced, and for the first time Benjamin West’s two original drawings of Ohio leaders negotiating with Bouquet and the return of the captives are featured. Also included are impressive maps drawn for the book by Thomas Hutchins, Bouquet’s engineer, of the Ohio country and the battle of Bushy Run in 1763.

Bouquet’s Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764 is a lasting contribution to our understanding of early Ohio and of warfare and diplomacy in the eighteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781631012082

Book preview

BOUQUET’S EXPEDITION AGAINST

THE OHIO INDIANS IN 1764

by

WILLIAM SMITH

BOUQUET’S EXPEDITION

AGAINST THE

OHIO INDIANS IN 1764

by

WILLIAM SMITH

Introduced, Edited, and Annotated

by Martin West

The Kent State University Press

KENT, OHIO

This publication was made possible in part through the generous support of John Doyle Ong.

© 2017 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Number 2016008086

ISBN 978-1-60635-294-6

Manufactured in Korea

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, William, 1727-1803, author. | West, Martin (Former director of Fort Ligonier), editor.

Title: Bouquet’s expedition against the Ohio Indians in 1764 / by William Smith ; introduced, edited, and annotated by Martin West.

Other titles: Historical account of the expedition against the Ohio Indians

Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2016. | Original title: An historical account of the expedition against the Ohio Indians. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008086 (print) | LCCN 2016010663 (ebook) | ISBN 9781606352946 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781631012082 (ePub) | ISBN 9781631012099 (ePDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Bouquet’s Expedition, 1764. | Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 1763-1765--Campaigns. | Bouquet, Henry, 1719–1765.

Classification: LCC E83.76 .S65 2016 (print) | LCC E83.76 (ebook) | DDC 973.2/7--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008086

21 20 19 18 17       5 4 3 2 1

To my ancestor Benjamin West,

History Painter to the King, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures,

and President of the Royal Academy

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Michael N. McConnell

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

PART ONE: EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

William Smith, the Author

Contributors and Sources

Publication of Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, 1765–78

PART TWO: BOUQUET’S EXPEDITION AGAINST

THE OHIO INDIANS IN 1764

Preface of the Translator C. G. F. Dumas, with a Sketch of the

Life of the Late General Bouquet

William Smith’s Introduction

An Historical Account of Colonel Bouquet’s Expedition,

Against the Ohio Indians in the Year 1764.

Postscript.

Reflections on the War with the Savages of North-America.

Appendices I–V

PART THREE: EDITOR’S APPENDICES 1–4

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

Following page 144

Plate 1. Colonel Henry Bouquet, attributed to John Wollaston

Plate 2. Edmund Burke, Studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds

Plate 3. Benjamin Franklin, Mason Chamberlain

Plate 4. Benjamin West, Matthew Pratt

Plate 5. General Johnson Saving a Wounded French Officer from the Tomahawk of a North American Indian, Benjamin West

Plate 6. The Indians Giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet, Benjamin West

Plate 7. The Indians Delivering up the English Captives to Colonel Bouquet, Benjamin West

Plate 8. Sir William Johnson, Matthew Pratt

Plate 9. Jefferies, Map & Printseller of St Martin’s Lane, Paul Sandby

Plate 10. Major Robert Rogers, Commander in Chief of the Indians in the Back Settlements of America, Johann Martin Will

Plate 11. Sir Jeffery Amherst, Joshua Reynolds

Plate 12. A Plan of Fort Ligonier Done by Theodosius McDonald for George Morton, Theodosius McDonald

Plate 13. General The Hon[our]able Tho[ma]s Gage OB[I]T, John Singleton Copley

Plate 14. General John Bradstreet, Thomas McIlworth

FIGURES

Fig. 1. The Reverend William Smith, John Sartain after Benjamin West

Fig. 2. Fourth Street Campus, College of Philadelphia: Academy/College Building and Dormitory/Charity School, Peter Eugène du Simitière

Fig. 3. Defeat and Death of General Edward Braddock in North America, Edmund Scott after David Dodd

Fig. 4. The legend identifying Thomas Hutchins as the draftsman of A General Map of the Country on the Ohio and Muskingham Shewing the Situation of the Indian=Towns

Fig. 5. The Line of March, Disposition to Receive the Enemy, General Attack, and Camp, attributed to Thomas Hutchins

Fig. 6. The title page of De Re militari veterum Romanorum Libri septem [Seven Books on the Art of War of the Ancient Romans] (1597)

Fig. 7. Praevalebit Aequior [The More Equitable Will Prevail], attributed to Benjamin West

Fig. 8. Savage Warrior Taking Leave of His Family, Francesco Bartolozzi after Benjamin West

Fig. 9. A Study for Pylades, Benjamin West

Fig. 10. Study for the Scene of Colonel Bouquet’s Conference with the Indians, Benjamin West

Fig. 11. The Indians Giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet, Charles Grignion after Benjamin West

Fig. 12. The Indians Delivering up the English Captives to Colonel Bouquet, Peter Canot after Benjamin West

Fig. 13. Colonel William Bradford, unattributed

Fig. 14. Old London Coffee House=S.W. Corner of Market and Front Street, photograph by James E. McClees

Fig. 15. A General Map of the Country on the Ohio and Muskingham Rivers (lower left map cartouche), Thomas Hutchins

Fig. 16. A General Map of the Country on the Ohio and Muskingham Rivers (lower right map cartouche), Thomas Hutchins

Fig. 17. Title page of William Smith, An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in the Year 1764

Fig. 18. A Plan of the New Fort at Pitts-burgh or Du Quesne Nov[embe]r, 1759, John Rocque and Mary Ann Rocque

Fig. 19. Fort Bedford, John Rocque and Mary Ann Rocque

Fig. 20. The Following Is a Rough Sketch of the Whole, attributed to Thomas Hutchins

MAPS

Map 1. A General Map of the Country on the Ohio and Muskingham Shewing the Situation of the Indian=Towns with Respect to the Army under the Command of Colonel Bouquet by Tho[ma]s Hutchins Ass[istan]t Engineer, and A Topographical Plan of That Part of the Indian=Country through Which the Army under the Command of Colonel Bouquet Marched in the Year, 1764, Thomas Hutchins

Map 2. Plan of the Battle Near Bushy-Run Gained by His Majesty’s Troops, Commanded by Colonel Henry Bouquet over the Delawares, Shawanese, Mingoes, Wyandot’s [sic], Mohikans, Miamies & Ottawas, on the 5th and 6th of August, 1763, Thomas Hutchins

Map 3. Line of March, Disposition to Receive the Enemy, General Attack, Camp, attributed to Thomas Hutchins

FOREWORD

Michael N. McConnell

Bouquet’s Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764 offers a near-contemporary account of the final campaign of the conflict popularly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. Using documents supplied by the expedition’s leader, Colonel Henry Bouquet, William Smith crafted a laudatory narrative of Bouquet’s encounter with Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, and his army’s march from Fort Pitt to the Muskingum Valley in the autumn of 1764. At a time when histories of the recently ended Seven Years’ War in America were appearing in Britain, Smith’s was the only one to deal exclusively with the Indian war that grew out of that global Anglo-French conflict.¹ Yet, while it soon appeared in several editions, Expedition was quickly overshadowed by other events. Bouquet died even as the book was going to press. The British Army slowly reduced its involvement in the trans-Appalachian West and, by 1772, only three small garrisons remained in the Great Lakes basin, while Fort Pitt was abandoned.² Moreover, affairs in the West had taken a back seat to the more unsettling problems of how a vast, transatlantic empire should be financed and governed, resulting in the Stamp Act, passed in 1765. British legislation and colonial response—the Stamp Act crisis—began a decade-long conflict over the nature of Britain’s empire that led to open rebellion. Smith’s account of the victory of empire over savages quickly lost its appeal as the very idea of a British Empire was hotly contested on both sides of the Atlantic. It would be nearly a century before Expedition found a place in American history, thanks to Francis Parkman, whose histories celebrated manifest destiny and the westward march of Anglo-American civilization. More recently, Smith’s book has been the subject of study by scholars whose primary interest lies in tracing the influence of the frontier and Native peoples on American national identity.³

Martin West’s splendid edition of Expedition allows us to see this work in its own terms, as a historical artifact that can be examined for what it can—and cannot—tell us about an important period in American colonial history. In the history of Bouquet’s campaigns, from Bushy Run to the Muskingum, we are able to see how well the British Army adapted to American conditions and the complicated, sometimes contradictory views of Native peoples that emerged as a result of a decade of frontier warfare. At the same time, we notice an absence of any understanding of, or sympathy for, Indian motives and interests, while the heroics attributed to Bouquet and his troops are allowed to overshadow other, more complicating versions of events. West is certainly the best person to produce this latest, indeed, definitive edition of Expedition. He is a lifelong student of regional military and social history and material culture and for thirty years the director of the Fort Ligonier Museum. Moreover, he is a highly skilled, dedicated scholar; the richly annotated text, as well as his own introduction and appendices, are based on meticulous research and a sophisticated understanding of the sources and their authors. Students of the times and events covered by Smith are unlikely to find a better, more authoritative rendering of Expedition.

The events at the heart of Smith’s work grew out of the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) and the peace that followed. By the mid-eighteenth century, the expansion of British and French colonies in North America had created a number of potential flash points from Nova Scotia to the southern Appalachians, in the process making conflict more likely. That collision of empires occurred in the upper Ohio Valley. As the vital gateway to the vast Middle West, the valley was, for Virginia land speculators, an avenue to riches and power. For the French, British expansion threatened the important commercial and alliance systems with Great Lakes Indians that provided security for New France as well as driving a wedge between the Canadian settlements and newer colonies in the Illinois Country and Louisiana. Complicating matters were the region’s Native inhabitants, the Ohio Indians, most of whom had moved into the Ohio Valley to escape land-hungry settlers and the threat of war between Britain and France.⁴

When, in 1754, Virginia chose to challenge French claims to the Ohio Country, fighting erupted. After two years of failure and defeat, British and provincial forces, directed by William Pitt, systematically reduced New France.⁵ It was during one of these operations—General John Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh)—that Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Bouquet gained his first experience in American warfare and with the Ohio Country, whose affairs would dominate the remainder of his life. As the day-to-day field commander of Forbes’s army, it was Bouquet who directed road building, fort building, and who trained a raw army of British and provincial troops.

The surrender of New France in 1760 and the general peace that followed radically altered the course of trans-Appalachian history. France and its ally, Spain, surrendered their claims throughout America east of the Mississippi River, leaving Britain with nominal control over lands from Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of Mexico and west to Lake Superior. The British claim to sovereignty in the West, ratified by treaty in Paris, was not accepted by the Native peoples living there. In fact, the region west of the Appalachians was still very much Indian country, a fact made starkly clear from the list of nations and towns taken by Smith from Bouquet’s military papers. Indeed, as British troops moved to occupy French posts on the Great Lakes, local Indians reminded the redcoats that, having had no voice in the treaty negotiations, they would accept the British only on their own terms. As one Ojibwa headman reminded a newly arrived British trader, although you have conquered the French, you have not conquered us. Respect, generosity, and negotiation—not meaningless claims of sovereignty—would be the only avenue toward peace.⁶

In the Ohio Country, meanwhile, the construction of massive Fort Pitt on the ruins of Fort Duquesne was meant to proclaim British dominion over the land and its peoples. Local Indians, especially the Delawares, found the prospect of troops in their midst profoundly unsettling. Natives, in fact, were struck dumb on learning of the Anglo-French treaty.⁷ Moreover, Forbes’s Road soon carried land-hungry colonists over the mountains, introducing a threat to security that Indians had hoped to avoid by moving west a generation earlier. Finally, the French surrender complicated relations with colonial empires for all Native peoples in the West. Prior to the war, Ottawas, Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnees, and others had been able to play off French and British interests to their own advantages: a deft brand of power politics that found colonial authorities often catering to Native interests in the hope of gaining allies and secure borders. Now, such opportunities had vanished: only the British were left standing in the West and play-off was pushed aside in favor of a dictatorial brand of diplomacy reflected in the policies of Sir Jeffery Amherst, the American commander in chief. In short, the Treaty of Paris did not bring peace to the frontiers, only the prospect of further conflict as Natives remained determined to protect their sovereignty in the face of British expansion.

Postwar cost-cutting and a shrinking, increasingly mutinous army meant that Britain was able to put only a token force into the West. Small garrisons—few numbering more than two dozen men—were no threat to Indians, only a reminder that British imperial reach had exceeded its grasp. There was mounting evidence of Native resentment over the lack of customary gifts to reinforce friendship as well as new rules governing the fur trade. Yet, attacks, when they began in the spring of 1763, took British troops and colonists by surprise. Within weeks, small posts fell to loosely coordinated attacks, leaving the army holding only Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt. Traders caught in Native towns were either killed or taken captive while Ohio Indians renewed their attacks against Pennsylvania border settlements still recovering from the Seven Years’ War.⁸ One measure of British desperation is the flurry of letters that passed between Amherst and Bouquet about the possibility of infecting Ohio Indians with smallpox as a way to stop their attacks and reduce their numbers. Both men considered the idea feasible and, in fact, bedding and handkerchiefs from Fort Pitt’s smallpox hospital were given to Indians during a brief truce, but evidently without the desired effect.⁹

It is in this context that we can best understand Smith’s emphasis on the Bushy Run affair. Bouquet’s small force was part of a desperate British effort to gain the initiative and put the Natives on the defensive. And, while similar efforts at Detroit failed, Bouquet’s force at least survived its ordeal and got to Fort Pitt. Yet, as Martin West reminds us, the colonel’s force took a terrible beating—losing roughly 20 percent of its numbers—and was unable to fulfill its mission by marching to Lake Erie. Moreover, the attacking force may not have outnumbered Bouquet and seems to have suffered fewer casualties. Neither Smith nor Bouquet could have known these details, of course, while the redcoats’ success in reaching Fort Pitt appeared to justify claims of a victory. Certainly, Amherst was grateful for any good news that summer and wasted no time in applauding Bouquet’s actions. Smith, the staunch advocate of empire, only further popularized Bouquet’s success.¹⁰

The war that began with a bang in 1763 ended in a whimper the following year. There was little fighting in part because British forces were concentrated in just a few easily defended posts; thus Indian fighters found fewer of the vulnerable outposts and outposts that they had overwhelmed the year before. Also, there had never been total unanimity among Indians about the wisdom of renewed warfare. By early 1764, Ohio Indians were launching fewer raids against border settlements while in the Great Lakes, Pontiac’s coalition at Detroit was rapidly falling apart. Therefore, when two British armies, led by Colonel John Bradstreet and Colonel Bouquet, pushed west, they met virtually no resistance and confronted Native leaders willing to discuss peace terms.¹¹ Bouquet’s greatest achievement, from Smith’s point of view and doubtless that of many settlers, was his success in retrieving scores of captives, mostly women and children, many held since the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War.¹²

Of the Indian hostages taken against the promise of peace negotiations, many escaped from Fort Pitt. An official end to fighting occurred in 1765, when Sir William Johnson, the Crown’s superintendent of Indian affairs in the North, met Native delegations at his home in the Mohawk Valley of New York. In retrospect it seems clear that each side had concluded that warfare would not meet its goals. Indians could kill redcoats and destroy forts, but could not eject the British from the West. Likewise, British leaders, Bouquet among them, realized that force could not bring a vast inland territory and its peoples under effective control; the costs in lives and money were simply too great. The result was an uneasy peace that lasted until the eve of the American Revolution, when new conflicts erupted between western Indians and the new, expansionist American republic.¹³

Smith’s work not only covers military operations as they were understood in 1765, but also raised other, equally important issues. One of the persistent myths surrounding warfare in colonial America is that British officers, out of stubbornness, arrogance, or ignorance, refused to adapt to the demands of fighting in America. From Braddock to the redcoats marching up Breed’s Hill, the picture is one of persistently one-dimensional thinking. The reality, as West is quick to point out, was very different. We know, for example, that "petite guerre" was widely practiced in Europe and the British themselves used these tactics during campaigns in Germany from 1758 to 1762.¹⁴ In America, Bouquet and other officers in the field were keen observers of geography, weather, and, above all, their French and Indian enemies. The plans and accompanying narrative in Expedition suggest that Bouquet had been developing ideas about frontier warfare for some time—at least since his first campaign experience in 1758. His army’s ability to survive the attack at Bushy Run, then, reflects their leader’s tactical planning and insight.

Smith devotes virtually all of his book to recounting Bouquet’s exploits and detailed suggestions on how to successfully wage war against American Indians. What he ignores, however, is the seismic shift in attitudes toward Natives that took place in the 1750s and early 1760s. Some hints of this come through in Smith’s persistent use of savages as a blanket term for all Indians. Simply put, a decade of warfare transformed a previously open frontier that saw Natives and newcomers accommodating to each other’s languages, customs, and values, a place where people were defined by behavior more than by ethnicity or race. In place of this fluid world in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there emerged a stark divide that increasingly placed Indians on one side and whites on the other. For some, notably Bouquet, this change was fraught with ambivalence. In 1758 the colonel could write of being amazed to See So much true understanding, dignity and Strength of argument in speeches by the army’s Cherokee allies. He swore that he never Saw better appearances.¹⁵ Yet, this is the same Bouquet who casually discussed the use of smallpox and mastiffs against Ohio Indians in 1763.

Though Bouquet never lost a grudging respect of Indians—even as enemies—the Paxton Boys and their murder of unarmed Conestoga Indians near Lancaster better represent the shifting ground of Indian relations. Hatred of Indians, regardless of whether they were professed friends or enemies, increasingly characterized colonial attitudes in the wake of particularly devastating wars between 1755 and 1764, conflicts in which attackers and victims often quite literally knew each other by name based on long prior association. Further driving Indian-hating was the rage directed at Quakers and provincial officials who seemed either unresponsive to the plight of border settlers or, worse, openly defended Native interests. Indeed, Smith, no champion of Indians, may have taken a certain delight in seeing his enemies, the Quakers and Benjamin Franklin, come in for abuse and threats from the Paxton mob.¹⁶ And we should bear in mind that much of the same transformation was occurring on the other side of the cultural divide. Those murdered schoolchildren and their teacher were, as West argues, victims of a tit-for-tat violence that characterized the frontier by 1764. In the meantime, Indians began to see themselves as different from, perhaps superior to, neighboring colonists. Other hints of changing attitudes appear in Smith’s discussion of the redeemed captives. He remarks on the emotions displayed by Ohio Indians when surrendering their captives, as Smith would have it, but adoptive kin who had often replaced specific members of families and clans, feelings that are at the heart of Benjamin West’s illustration of the scene at the Muskingum towns. Smith, however, rejects Native life as an alternative to civilization and expresses amazement when some captives either resist repatriation or escape to their adoptive families, individuals widely identified as white Indians.¹⁷ In the same way, Reflections on the War with the Savages of North-America urges soldiers—and, by extension, frontier settlers generally—to adopt Native habits of stoicism, resourcefulness, and adaptability. However, this advice is offered with a view of defeating or dominating Indians, not as a way for colonists to become savages themselves. By the 1760s, then, America was already moving rapidly toward the fabled categories of red and white as the open frontier was replaced by lines and rigidly enforced borders.¹⁸

In Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, then, Martin West allows us to consider this valuable work on several levels. This history of military operations and treatise on frontier warfare is a window onto a particular time and place as well as a remarkably collaborative work that drew on men from both sides of the British Atlantic, one with a fascinating history of its own. Readers are indeed fortunate in having West’s guidance and insight available as they explore the book for themselves.

1. Histories of the war include Thomas Mante, The History of the Late War in North America (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1772), and John Entick, The General History of the Late War …, 3 vols. (London: Edward Dilly and John Millan, 1763–64).

2. These were Forts Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Niagara. There also remained a small detachment of troops at Kaskaskia in the Illinois Country.

3. See Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2000), esp. 224–35.

4. On the early history of the upper Ohio Valley, see Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1940); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1992); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).

5. The best treatment of the war in America is Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

6. Alexander Henry, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories Between the Years 1760 and 1776, ed. James Bain (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle & Co., 1969), 44.

7. John W. Jordan, ed., Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763, Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography, April 1913, 187.

8. The classic study of the 1763 war is Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1851); modern works include Howard Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (New York: Russell and Russell, 1947); Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, The Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002); David Dixon, Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2005); Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Causes, Course, and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2007). On the condition of the army in America, see Peter Way, The Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763–1764, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 57 (2000): 761–92.

9. Elizabeth Fenn, Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst, Journal of American History 86 (Mar. 2000): 1552–80; see also McConnell, A Country Between, 194–95.

10. Victory is also culturally relative. Bouquet’s troops, trained in European military conventions, were prepared to stand and take losses in hope of success. Such behavior was deemed foolhardy by Indian fighters for whom success was measured in the ability to inflict—not absorb—casualties. This logic also lay behind the Natives’ unwillingness to attack prepared defenses. See McConnell, A Country Between, 193–94.

11. Dowd, War Under Heaven, ch. 7; Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War of America (New York: Viking, 2007), 36–42.

12. Ian Steele, Setting All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2013), ch. 15, esp. 339.

13. On these later conflicts, see Calloway, The Shawnees, and the essays by Jon Parmenter, Keith Widder, Elizabeth Perkins, and Eric Hinderaker in The Sixty Years’ War on the Great Lakes, 1754–1814, ed. David Curtis Skaggs and Larry Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 2001).

14. The best work on this subject is P. E. Russell, Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740–1760, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 35, no. 4 (Oct. 1978): 629–52; a more recent study is Charles E. Brodine Jr., Henry Bouquet and British Infantry Tactics on the Ohio Frontier, 1758–1764, in Skaggs and Nelson, eds., The Sixty Years’ War, 43–62.

15. Bouquet to St. Clair, Fort Loudoun, June 16, 1758, in The Papers of Henry Bouquet, 6 vols., ed. Sylvester K. Stevens, Donald H. Kent, Louis Waddell et al. (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1951–94), II:102. Benjamin West’s The Indians Giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet captures some of the genuine British fascination with Native council protocol and rhetoric.

16. Steele, Setting All the Captives Free, 343–44.

17. James Axtell, The White Indians of Colonial America, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 32 (1975): 55–88.

18. Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empire on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003), 190–96. The deterioration of frontier relations can be followed in James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999). On the issue of race, see Alden T. Vaughan, From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian, American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (Oct. 1982): 917–53; Nancy Shoemaker, How Indians Got to Be Red, American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 625–44.

PREFACE

The origin of this book dates to 1998, when as executive director of Fort Ligonier in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, I met Mr. John D. Ong. Recently elected to the Fort Ligonier board of trustees, he had retired as chairman and CEO of the B. F. Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, the previous year. Among his many other interests, Mr. Ong is a bibliophile, and our conversations frequently turned to the subject of eighteenth-century books, most notably William Smith’s An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the Year 1764, Under the Command of Henry Bouquet…. (Philadelphia, 1765), a fascinating, almost contemporary document of recent events with themes of military conflict, diplomacy, the Ohio Native peoples, and their captives and adoptees. Recognizing the significance and relevance of this work to our institutional mission, we attempted to obtain wherever possible first editions and printings of Expedition dating to the 1760s and 1770s for the Fort Ligonier Museum, where they would be available for the purposes of research, study, and exhibition. Accordingly, with Mr. Ong’s assistance on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, originals of most of them were located and subsequently purchased or received through donation.

With these accessions to the permanent collection of Fort Ligonier, we decided that since no scholarly, readily available, and easily accessible version of Expedition had ever been written, the various elements of all the original editions could be combined in a new, annotated publication placed in the proper historical context for modern readers, but our proposal could not be acted upon at the time. Mr. Ong was appointed the United States ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway in 2001, where he served for five years, and I was wholly occupied by my professional work at Fort Ligonier. Following my retirement in 2011 after three decades as Fort Ligonier director, the ambassador suggested that our Expedition project be resumed, which has resulted in this volume.

Having been published in Philadelphia, London, Amsterdam, Dublin (three times), and Paris (twice) between 1765 and 1778, Expedition was immensely popular, being the most widely circulated and read work on indigenous fighting methods to emerge from the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War in America (traditionally and inaccurately known as the French and Indian War). The impact and literary reputation of Expedition surpassed all other books on the topic appearing in North America and Europe during this period. Copies of one of the three initial editions were owned or read by such founders as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence; Paul Revere, the Boston engraver and silversmith, Pierre Eugène du Simitière, an antiquarian and the designer of the first seal of the United States; Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Northern Indian Affairs; his Ohio departmental deputy, George Croghan; and David Jones, a New Jersey Baptist missionary to the Shawnee people (1772–73). In Great Britain, King George III; Horace (Horatio) Walpole, the man of letters sitting in the House of Commons; Archbishop of London Richard Terrick; Pennsylvania Proprietor Thomas Penn; and Hugh Montgomerie, 12th Earl of Eglintoun, a participant in the 1758 expedition against Fort Duquesne, all had this volume in their libraries. Even in Germany, future general Johann von Ewald, an officer of the Hessian Feld Jäger Corps in America (1776–84), cited Expedition in his writings.

Expedition was more than the authoritative, polished account of a memorable and consequential military campaign conducted without violence into the Ohio Country that brought about a truce, a repatriation of prisoners, and a renewal of trade. In word and image it helped shape how Europeans after 1765 came to conceive the warfare and diplomacy as practiced by the Ohio peoples, and it provided one of the most prominent descriptions of Indian captivity narratives we have available in sources from the eighteenth century. In more recent times, the dramatic and unusual events described by Smith—particularly the return of over two hundred captives to Colonel Henry Bouquet during the autumn of 1764—directly influenced the highly successful historical novel written by Conrad Richter, The Light in the Forest, 1953, and the Walt Disney movie of the same name five years later. As Richard Slotkin has observed in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800, William Smith’s work was one of the most significant studies of wilderness life and warfare (31).

Bringing together the Ohio Country with the British Atlantic world, this edition of Expedition is organized into two parts, the first being the editor’s introduction. It consists of essays on the author William Smith and his direct and indirect contributors, Henry Bouquet, Thomas Hutchins, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin West, relating their association with Smith, their roles in the Seven Years’ War and the Native American resistance of 1763–64 (the war called Pontiac’s), and their connection to Expedition. Also discussed are the two writers respectively of important sources cited by Smith, one in 1764 by Edmund Burke, and the other from the late sixteenth century by Giovanni Antonio Valtrini. My interpretive approach for this small coterie of Americans and Europeans was informed by the method of research known as prosopography: the construction of the patterns of relationships, functions, and activities through the study of collective biographies. For Expedition, an understanding was sought of the specific cultural, intellectual, political, social, or military connections that associated the six contributors and authors Smith used to research and write his book. Part One concludes with a recounting for the first time of the early publishing history of Expedition.

Part Two is an edited and annotated version of the full text of Expedition meant to enhance readability and comprehension by identifying the individuals, peoples, places, events, and terminology found on Smith’s pages, including martial and topographical terms. It is taken from Smith’s first edition published in Philadelphia (1765), the London edition of the following year featuring two engravings after Benjamin West of Bouquet with the Ohio peoples, and the 1769 edition in Amsterdam translated into the French language by Charles-Guillaume-Frédéric Dumas. The succeeding reprintings in Dublin and Paris also were consulted, as were the several lengthy extracts of Expedition in The Olden Time (1846) by Neville B. Craig, along with the edition issued in Cincinnati twenty-two years later and the reprint of it in 1907. The chapters in Part Two present the complete, original biography of Bouquet by Dumas that appeared in the Amsterdam version; Smith’s introduction of events in 1763 largely derived from Burke’s Annual Register; the history of the 1764 Ohio expedition drawn in part from Hutchins’s journal; and Bouquet’s military system of recruiting, training, and settlement designed to counter the Ohio warriors, as well as Smith’s appendices. This new edition of Expedition concludes with my four editor’s appendices: concise studies of the numbers and the losses of the Ohio warriors at the battle of Bushy Run in 1763, the circumstances of Bouquet’s death two years subsequently, and other evidence corroborating Smith’s authorship of Expedition, in addition to a comprehensive index.

Martin West

Ligonier, Pennsylvania

September 2016

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was inevitably a joint enterprise, and my introducing, editing, and annotating of it could not have been accomplished without the generous assistance of numerous scholars and specialists. I am deeply grateful to my friend, Ambassador John D. Ong, for his encouragement, advice, and support for the Expedition project since its inception. Michael N. McConnell, David L. Preston, and Timothy J. Shannon read and greatly improved the manuscript through their counsel, insight, and criticism. Mike also wrote the exemplary foreword introducing this volume. The annotation was helped in many ways by my readers Douglas R. Cubbison, Brian Leigh Dunnigan, and David Miller. Other scholars, both here and abroad, willingly offered their expertise on specific topics. In this country, they were John A. Gallucci, Scott Paul Gordon, James L. Kochan, Walter L. Powell, Allan Staley, and the late David Dixon; in Europe, Robert Lawson-Peebles in England, Lawrence Keppie (a descendant of General John Forbes) in Scotland, T. O. McLaughlin in Ireland, Stephen Brumwell in The Netherlands, James H. Swetnam in Italy, and Denis De Lucca in Malta.

Expedition is based on research and study conducted over many years. In this regard, several eminent institutions provided me with much appreciated research opportunities. I thank Linda August at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Sarah A. Borden at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the staff of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Brian Dunnigan at the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan, Isabel Keating with the Archives of the Church of England at Lambeth Palace Library in London, Katherine Ludwig at the David Library of the American Revolution, and Sarah Wilcox at the New York State Historical Association Research Library. The libraries of two local institutions where I have been an adjunct lecturer of history and museum education, the University of Pittsburgh and St. Vincent College respectively, were frequent and conducive workplaces. In addition, I used certain of the Fort Ligonier permanent collections acquired during my tenure as director.

Sincere appreciation is also extended to the museums, libraries, and galleries that enabled me to add the illustrations crucial to interpreting and enhancing the text. Included are Ellen McCallister Clark, Library, Archives, and Information Services, The Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.; Ronna Dixson, Johnson Hall State Historic Site, Johnstown, New York, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; Susan Drinan of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent; Brian Dunnigan, Diana Sykes, Austin Thomas, Clayton Lewis, and J. Kevin Graffagnino of the William L. Clements Library, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Peter Harrington, Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; Tim Horning, University Archives and Records Center, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Jennifer Johns of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Nicole Joniec of the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Library of Congress, Print Division, Washington, D.C.; Brian Moeller and Manuel Flores, Library Imaging Services, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; John Powell, Digital Imaging Services, The Newberry Library, Chicago; Robbi Siegel, Research/Permissions, Art Resource, Inc., New York; Giema Tsakuginow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Yale Center of British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; Miloslava Waldman of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; and in the United Kingdom, Matthew Bailey of the National Portrait Gallery, London; Lucy Bamford of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby, England; Trustees of the British Museum, London; and Agata Rutkowska, Picture Library, Royal Collection, London. Thanks also to Amanda Siegel and LuAnn Campbell, who processed dozens of interlibrary loans for me at the local Adams Memorial Library, and to Keith West, digital imaging consultant, Floyd A. Barmann, and Michael Hagan.

At the Kent State University Press in Kent, Ohio, the professional staff offered expert guidance at every stage of the editorial process and development of the book. My sincere appreciation and thanks go to the entire KSUP staff and Valerie Ahwee, copy editor.

Above all, I want to thank my family. Our two grown children, Jane and Ben, were always enthusiastic about Expedition and helped with typing and research, respectively. My wife, Penny, a retired teacher and museum educator, patiently supported me throughout the long process, assisting on our research trips, organizing interlibrary loans, arranging for the illustrations, and handling much of our electronic correspondence. This book would have been an impossibility without her participation.

ABBREVIATIONS