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THE FIRST PUSH WESTWARD OF THE ALBANY TRADERS¹

“I must say that the English in these Colonies are too careless and lazy: The French coureurs de bois, are much readier for Enterprises, and the Canadese are certainly more vigilant and more active.”² Thus Lahontan contrasted the Indian traders of the rival nations. As far as spectacular achievement in discovery and exploration is concerned, his estimate of the French Canadians is sound enough, but other considerations may give a different balance. In crafty diplomacy, in a sense for economic gain, in laying a foundation for a cautious western extension of the fur trade, the Albany traders proved themselves neither careless nor lazy. By 1694 these supposedly apathetic men had penetrated to Mackinac and to the Wabash, had smoked the calumet and had bartered powder and rum for beaver with the Ottawa, the Miami, and the western Shawnee.

Cut off from the west by no physical barriers, with the advantages of the Mohawk river route, all roads from Albany led into the west, and all roads from the west led to Albany. But all these roads passed through the Iroquois Indian country. On this geographical fact was based an important economic and political alignment. The Iroquois confederacy consisted of five tribes of Indians: the Mohawk, occupying the valley of the Mohawk river from the vicinity of Schenectady to the site of Utica; the Oneida, about forty-five miles west of the Mohawk; the Onondaga, extending northward to Lake Ontario and southward to the Susquehanna; the Cayuga, situated on the shores of Cayuga lake; and the Seneca, located south of Lake Ontario, extending

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west to the Lake Erie shore. These five nations lay athwart the route of the Albany trader to the western Indians. Of this fact the Iroquois made capital by assuming the role of middleman between Albany and the “far Indians,” a part impossible to play with the French, who could avoid them by using the Ottawa river route.

Sharp is the contrast between British and French trading methods. The British preferred to establish trading posts to which they persuaded the Indians to come. The French, on the other hand, far from remaining tamely within the limits of some fort or settlement, followed the Indians to their hunting grounds and obtained their furs fresh from the slaughter. The middleman’s role was also made easier for the Iroquois because British goods were cheaper than the French. At Albany, for eight pounds of powder the Indian paid one beaver; at Montreal, he paid four beavers.³ At Albany, for a gun he paid two beavers, as compared with five beavers at Montreal. The British gave six quarts of rum for one beaver; the French had no fixed rate but never gave as much as a quart of liquor for a beaver.

Not only was the Iroquois confederacy a barrier between the Albany traders and the western Indians; it was, in the words of Governor Dongan, “a bulwark between us and the French.”⁴ Hence on the basis of mutual policy was formed the Anglo-Iroquoian alliance, formally inaugurated on September 24, 1664, with an agreement at Albany between representatives of the Five nations and Colonel George Cartwright.⁵ This agreement was not an innovation in the relations between the Iroquois and Europeans, but was, along with the policy of giving the Albany council complete control of Indian affairs and trade for the colony, a legacy from the Dutch, who about 1643 had made a similar compact with part of the Iroquois.

The evidence of a western push on the part of the Albany traders during the Dutch régime is scant. In December, 1634, an Albanian of uncertain identity, accompanied by Jeronimus de la Croix and William Tomassen, made a journey up the valley of the Mohawk to the villages of the Oneida because “trade

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was doing very badly.”⁶ The Dutch at Albany also had trading relations with some tribes of western Indians; at least in 1687 Governor Dongan made the statement that the Ottawa had traded at Albany ever since its establishment.⁷ Similarly the evidence of a western movement by the Albany traders during the first years of the British régime—from 1664 to 1678—is of the filmiest. In 1672 Governor Frontenac erected near the northeast shore of Lake Ontario the fort which bears his name. To offset any advantages in trade that the French might secure by this move, the British dispatched agents among the Indians to carry on a propaganda for Albany goods.⁸ In August, 1675, Governor Andros went to Albany and had a conference with the “most warrlike Indyans neare a hundred miles beyound Albany which Indyans (and Associates to about four hundred miles further) applyed, declaring their former Allyance, and now submitted in an Extraordinary manner.”⁹ Two years later Andros sent two “Christians”¹⁰ to the Seneca to request them to send representatives to a conference at Albany.¹¹ In the same year Wentworth Greenhalgh made a tour of inspection to all the Iroquois villages.¹² Again in the late fall of 1677 Andros dispatched two white interpreters into the west to protest against the raids of the Iroquois and “far Indians” on the southern colonies.¹³ These messengers were stalled at Onondaga by the rigor of winter. Such incidents as these, while they reveal an interest in what lay beyond Albany, scarcely show a virile push westward of trading operations.

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From 1678 a fuller narrative of the relations between Albany and the Indians is available in the form of Wraxall’s Abridgment of the New York Indian affairs. The indefatigable Peter Wraxall, commissioned in 1750 as secretary to the Indians for the government of New York and as town clerk of Albany, to show his “Zeal for the Welfare of the British Dominions in North America” and to aid “His Majesty’s Administration in proposing & persuing Methods for the Security & Prosperity of the North American Colonies,” made a compendium of the transactions between Albany and the Indians from 1678 to 1751. Among the first entries in this work is an account of the embassy of the Seneca to Albany in March, 1678. These envoys in behalf of all the “Indians Westward” renewed the “Treaty of Unity, Peace, & Friendship.” In the same year the commandant at Albany sent two interpreters to persuade the Oneida to come to Albany to be assured of British friendship.”¹⁴ In response the Oneida sent an embassy to Albany in February, 1679, and acknowledged British sovereignty over the Indians from New York to Lake Erie.¹⁵

In the meanwhile the French did not regard these activities of the British among the Indians with equanimity. In November, 1679, Governor Frontenac wrote to Versailles that he feared French trade with the Ottawa and other western Indians would be impaired through the operations of the British; that Governor Andros had retained in Albany and “even well treated a man named Peré and others who have been debauched from Sieur de la Salle, with the design to employ and send them among the Ottawas, to open a Trade with them.”¹⁶ A short time later Peré returned to the Ottawa, accompanied by “one Turcot, a long time a French refugee among the English.”¹⁷ Then several years later, in November, 1683, the French officer, Charles le Moyne, reported to Governor de la Barre that he had

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encountered and put to flight two canoes on Lake Erie manned by French deserters “who were disposed to point out and open to the English and Dutch the road to the Outaouas.”¹⁸ Obviously the Albany traders were not without guides to the western country; if the Indians were not available, there was always the tempter in the form of the French deserter.

In 1683 a dynamic force was injected into New York Indian affairs in the personality of the new governor, Colonel Thomas Dongan. An era of westward expansion dawned for the Albany Indian trade. An imperialist, Dongan pressed the claims of the British to territory surrounding the Great lakes, gave his official sanction to trading expeditions to the Ottawa and the Hurons, worked on the Iroquois for an open route to the western Indians, and granted to the Albany traders “their great charter of ‘liberties,’” which recognized and confirmed their monopolistic control of Indian relations and trade. In a speech on August 5, 1684, Dongan urged the Iroquois to make an offensive and defensive alliance with the Ottawa, the Miami, and “further Indians,” and to open a path for them to come to Albany to trade.¹⁹ In the summer of 1684 he sent the arms of the duke of York to be hung up on all the Iroquois castles, Arnout Viele, expert interpreter, being the envoy who raised the arms of the duke at the Onondaga villages.²⁰ At the same time Viele was instructed to do his utmost to prevent the Five nations from negotiating with De la Barre, who was reported to have preparations under way for an expedition to Lakes Erie and Ontario.

The French regarded with consternation the gradual tightening of the British hold on the Five nations. The placing of the escutcheon of the house of York on the Iroquois castles, coupled with the fact that Dongan assumed himself “sovereign lord of the whole of North America, south of the St. Lawrence” impressed even the pusillanimous Canadian governor as the very acme of insolence. Moreover, the French were aroused by the outrageous conduct of the Seneca, who “in cold blood, pillaged

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seven hundred canoes belonging to Frenchmen . . . and afterwards attacked Ft. St. Louis of the Illinois where Chevalier de Baugy gallantly defended himself.” To cap the climax, the Five nations presumed to introduce the British traders into waters sacred to the French, the Great lakes.²¹ De la Barre protested sharply to Dongan. In a reply of July 14, 1684, Dongan attempted to propitiate the irate Frenchman by declaring that, provided the French were prohibited from trading east of Lake Ontario, he would forbid the British to trade west of it.²² But developments had gone too far, and De la Barre refused to be put off longer by the glib promises of the New York governor.

So in the fall of 1684 the Canadian governor made his expedition to Lake Erie to treat with the Iroquois, and during the course of the negotiations he reproached one of the sachems for having “introduced the English to the Lakes, belonging to the King, my Master, and into the Country of those Nations to whom my Master is a Father.”²³ In replying the Indians admitted having “conducted the English to our Lakes, in order to traffick with the Outaouas and the Hurons.”²⁴ So it is evident that in addition to their trading activities among the Iroquois and their efforts to cement more firmly the alliance with the Iroquois by sending envoys even to their farthest nation near the Lake Erie shore, namely the Seneca, the British actually traded on Lake Erie prior to 1685.

Dongan did not hesitate to follow up with official action these western operations of free-lance traders. “Acting rather the part of a trader than a governor,” to quote a disparaging remark of a French official, in the fall of 1685 he licensed Captain Johannes Rooseboom to make a trading expedition to the western Indians. Guided by the French deserter, Abel Merrion, with ten canoes loaded with merchandise, Rooseboom’s party coasted along Lake Ontario, made the grand portage to Lake Erie, and thence paddled into Lake Huron. The Ottawa and the Hurons received the British bargains with open arms, invited their purveyors to return every year, and expressed a

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desire that their enemies, the Seneca, open a path for them to come to Albany to trade.²⁵

The French were electrified by the news of this venture. Governor Denonville wrote to the French ministry in October, 1686: “Missilimakinak is theirs. They have taken its latitude, have been to trade there with our Outawa and Huron Indians, who received them cordially on account of the bargains they gave. . . . Unfortunately we had but very few Frenchmen at Missilimakinak at that time. M. de la Durantaye on arriving there wanted to pursue the English to pillage them. The Hurons were hastening to escort them after having expressed a great many impertinences against us. Sieur de la Durantaye did not overtake the English who met the Senecas on their way to join and escort them through Lakes Erie and Ontario, until they should be beyond all danger of an attack from us.”²⁶ Of course the French protested to Governor Dongan. In a letter of October 1, 1686, Denonville accused him of instructing Arnout Viele, the emissary dispatched to the Onondaga in the summer of 1685, to urge the Five nations to make war on the French, and added, “you are not a stranger to the enterprise of your merchants against Michilimaquina.”²⁷ To this indictment Dongan made the naïve reply, “I am altogether as ignorant of any enterprise made by the Indians out of this Government, as I am by what you meane by ‘mihillmiqum.’”²⁸

Emboldened by the success of 1685, the next year Dongan sent out a more ambitious trading venture. An expedition, divided into two companies, was fitted out. The first division, with a personnel of fifty and with twenty canoes, freighted principally with rum, commanded by Captain Rooseboom, left Albany on September 11, 1686. The party proceeded westward and established winter quarters with the Seneca, with the intention of going to Mackinac in the spring.²⁹ The other division, commanded by Major Patrick Macgregory, who had particular orders

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from Dongan not to “meddle with the French,” was to follow the trail of Rooseboom, but was not to leave Albany until the spring of 1687.³⁰ The French, if alarmed by the venture of 1685, were now thoroughly aroused. On November 16, 1686, Denonville wrote to the French ministry: “If the English continue their expeditions in this manner, and the king is unwilling that war be waged against them, nothing is to be expected for this Colony but its ruin.”³¹ In the same letter he stated further that “the English Governor prompted by the cupidity of his merchants and by his own avarice to drag largesses from them, claims the whole country as his,” and that “the war begun and badly carried on by M. de la Barre has been the cause of all our misfortunes; it has reunited the Iroquois to the English who adopt the true means of destroying this Colony by depriving it of its allies and commerce.”

It was under such apprehensions as these that Denonville planned an expedition to Lake Erie to crush the Iroquois once for all, and ordered the French officers in command of western posts, Durantaye, Dulhut, Tonti, and La Forest, to proceed with their respective forces to a common rendezvous at Niagara. In execution of these orders, in the spring of 1687 Durantaye proceeded eastward and on Lake Huron encountered and captured Rooseboom’s party. With his prisoners the Frenchman went south, and below Fort St. Joseph was joined by Dulhut, Tonti, and La Forest. Here, in the words of Tonti, “we made more canoes and coasted along Lake Erie to Niagara, where we made a fort below the portage to wait there for news. On our way we took thirty more Englishmen, who were going to Michilimackinak, commanded by Major Gregoire.”³²

The troubles of the French did not end with the capture of the British. For the chief stock in trade of the Albany traders was rum, which the French did not want the Indians to drink. They were especially anxious that the Potawatomi, who “had no knowledge of the English or that bewitching liquor,” should not indulge.³³ At the same time the Indians who had been taken

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prisoners with the British conspired with some malcontents of Tonti’s party in a futile attempt to persuade all the Indians to mutiny. The conspirators urged that the French were cheats who charged exorbitant prices for their goods, while the British, good-natured and honest, sold goods at reasonable rates. The British prisoners were conveyed first to Fort Frontenac, thence to Montreal, and finally to Quebec, where, after enduring four months’ imprisonment, they were released.

Despite their frustration of this attempt of the British to trade at Mackinac, the French were in despair over the westward extension of British influence and trade. They saw in such a movement the ultimate defection or annihilation of their Indian allies by the powerful Iroquois, encouraged with fine promises and, what was more tangible, supplied with guns and ammunition by the British. The tottering state of French empire in America, because of the encroachments of the British through the medium of the Five nations, is set forth in a memoir on the state of Canada, prepared in 1687 for the perusal of the French ministry. To begin with, according to this memoir, the British used the Iroquois to incite other Indians against the French: in 1686 the Iroquois made a surprise attack on the Hurons and the Ottawa, took more than seventy-five prisoners, and promised peace and restitution of the prisoners on condition that these Indians would renounce the French and acknowledge the overlordship of Britain.³⁴ Furthermore, the report accuses the Albany traders of deliberately drawing away the western Indians from the French by means of their prices for goods, fifty per cent lower than those of the French. Besides seducing the French Indians, British bargains attracted “all our Coureurs de bois and French libertines who carry their peltries to them, deserting our Colony, and establishing themselves among the English who take great pains to encourage them.” Finally, the report concludes that war on the Iroquois is “necessary to avert from us a general Indian Rebellion which would bring down ruin on our trade and cause eventually even the extirpation of our Colony.”

In fact, so undermined was French power in the west that Dongan in September, 1687, could say with truth, “and as to

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their [the Iroquois’] Warring with the farther Indyans that is more hurtfull to us than the French they being inclined to trade with us rather than them which by their Warring is hindered.”³⁵ A further evidence of French weakness was the successful attack which the Iroquois made on the island of Montreal in July, 1688. This exploit induced the Ottawa to make overtures to the all-powerful British. For “they sent openly four Sachems to assure them that they would forever renounce all Friendship with the French. They also included seven Nations that lived near Missilimakinak in this Peace.”³⁶

The upshot was that in the fall of 1688 Denonville, perceiving the impossibility of smashing the Anglo-Iroquoian alliance, was ready to acknowledge British suzerainty over the Iroquois and their lands provided that the British would curtail the hostile activities of the Iroquois in the west.³⁷ But the feeble efforts of Denonville to relieve the precarious situation of the French availed nothing. And in January, 1689, Callières, governor of the island of Montreal, wrote to the French ministry that the British were planning a trading expedition to Mackinac with a view to capture it and seize all the peltries collected there as a reprisal for the goods taken from the ill-starred Rooseboom-Macgregory venture of 1687.³⁸ Callières concluded his letter with the pessimistic conjecture that the British were “about to endeavor to invest the entire of Canada and raise all the savages against us, in order to wholly deprive us of every sort of Trade and draw it all to themselves by means of the cheap bargains they can give of goods, at nearly at one-half the price our Frenchmen can afford theirs.”

Beginning in 1689 there was a change in tactics. Acrimonious correspondence and surreptitious encouragement of Indian warfare were succeeded by open fighting between the French and the British. William III repudiated the pro-French foreign policy of his Stuart predecessors and boldly declared war on the grand monarque. Louis wisely returned the comte de Frontenac as governor of Canada.

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Almost immediately there was a halt in the operations of the Albany traders westward and in the triumphs of the Iroquois war bands. Frontenac assumed the offensive, sent out raiding parties to devastate the Iroquois lands, and in 1690 a band of French and Indians swept down the Hudson and burned Schenectady. By Frontenac’s energy and genius the wavering western Indians were won back to the French, and French empire in America for the time was saved. In 1690, having shown what the military power of Canada could accomplish, Frontenac sent envoys to the Iroquois with the olive branch; but Captain Leisler, then in control at Albany, having been informed of this action, dispatched Arnout Viele, his Indian interpreter, into the west to prevent such a catastrophe as a Franco-Iroquoian alliance. Viele succeeded so well that the French agents were seized by the Iroquois and all but one were burned at the stake.³⁹ In the same year the Dawangahoe, a tribe of the Ottawa, influenced by the representations of the Iroquois, sent peace envoys to Albany to agitate for an open trading route through the Iroquois country.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the rejuvenation of the French was having a marked effect upon the extent of the Albany trade; for in 1693, in a report to the board of trade, a prominent colonial official stated that the Indian trade, “which is the only maintenance of the inhabitants of Albany,” was “wholly stopt.”⁴¹

The hazards of trade on the Great lakes were now too great for the British. Consequently Albany enterprise sought an outlet in another portion of the west. In 1691-1692 the British established relations with a new tribe of “far Indians,” namely the Shawnee, who sent a peace embassy to Albany.⁴² The imagination of one Albanian, at least, was fired by this visit; and that was the imagination of Arnout Viele. As Indian interpreter, trader, and explorer, this Dutchman figures prominently in the history of Albany Indian relations. According to a report drawn up in 1696 for the board of trade, Viele, “who has lived a long time with the Indians and frequently converses with them,” was the person in the province best qualified to treat

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with the Indians.⁴³ And so in the decade 1682-1692 he was employed by the colony of New York in every important Indian transaction. With an eye for the economic rewards of trade, he participated in the Rooseboom venture of 1686-1687 and was taken prisoner with the other members of the company.⁴⁴ He was involved in the coup d’état staged by Captain Leisler in 1689, and on the downfall of the Leisler faction lost his position as official interpreter for the province.⁴⁵ As a result, in 1692 he was free to make a trading expedition to the Shawnee and to carry Albany goods into a country as yet unexploited by the British traders of the north, the Ohio river valley.

In the autumn of 1692, accompanied by some Delaware and Shawnee Indians, Viele left Albany, went south to New Jersey, then west to the Susquehanna, embarked on that river, thence journeyed to the Allegheny, floated down it to the Ohio, and explored the waters of the Ohio as far west as the Wabash.⁴⁶ He traded with and attempted to enlist in the British cause the Miami Indians in the Wabash river basin. He made an extended sojourn in the country of the western Shawnee, who then occupied the territory between the Cumberland and Ohio rivers.

It was not until the early part of 1694 that news of the intrepid Dutchman, who two years before had so gallantly plunged into the unknown west, filtered to the seaboard. When rumors began to float into Albany that Viele had survived the perils of the wilderness path and was on his way east, the whole town and province were agog. Captain Arent Schuyler exploded the first bomb. On his return from a visit to the Minisink Indians of New Jersey in February, 1694, he stated that he had been told that “six days agoe three Christians and two Shanwans Indians who went about fifteen months agoe with Arnout Vielle into the Shanwans Country were passed by the Minnissinek going for Albany to fech powder for Arnout and his Company.”⁴⁷

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A few days later Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, reported to Governor Fletcher the arrival in town of a certain Gerrit Luykasse accompanied by “two of ye farr Indians called Showanoes.”⁴⁸ Luykasse brought news that Viele, loaded with beaver and accompanied by a “considerable number” of Shawnee, expected to reach Albany in the summer. Then, on February 6, Mayor Schuyler told the representatives of the Five nations that “forerunners of the Shawanoes or far Indians” had arrived in town with the report that Viele, accompanied by “seven Nations of Indians” was on his way to Albany.⁴⁹ Even the Five nations, drugged into complacency by the excitement of the day, offered no opposition to Viele’s operations among their foes, the “far Indians.” Certain of their sachems magnanimously informed Governor Fletcher that they did not “take it amiss when the Governor sends to the Dawangahoes about Peace or that Arent the Interpreter went to the far Indians.”⁵⁰

True to reports, in the summer of 1694 Viele headed a veritable triumphal procession into Pennsylvania. He had departed escorted by a handful of Delaware and Shawnee Indians; he returned with hundreds in his retinue. A band of Shawnee left their hunting grounds on the Cumberland to follow Viele east to the Delaware river where they established a settlement.

Rumor is hydra-headed. In this case it whispered into hostile ears on the Mississippi as well as into friendly ears on the Hudson. Indeed, reports of Viele’s audacious expedition rumbled with a five years’ echo in the French west. Scarcely had Viele arrived safely in Albany when Henri de Tonti, on September 11, 1694, wrote to the French government: “We have even been advised that one named Annas (Arias?), of the English nation, accompanied by the Loup savages has had some speech with the Miami in order to draw them to them, which will give them a strong foothold for the success of their enterprise, if he corrupts them.”⁵¹ Five years later, in August, 1699, Iberville reported to the French ministry that according to the opinions

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of all Frenchmen familiar with the Ohio country, “some men, twelve in number, and some Maheingans [Mohegan], who are savages whom we call Loups started seven years ago from New York in order to go up the river Andaste [Susquehanna] which is in the province of Pennsylvania, as far as the River Ohio which is said to join the Wabash, flowing together into the Mississippi.”⁵²

Thus the British traders stand acquitted; Lahontan’s accusation of carelessness and laziness fades into vacuity when scrutinized in the white light of history. The French Canadians certainly did not have a monopoly upon the art of exploration. The dauntless Virginians—Batts, Fallam, Needham, and Arthur—explored the upper waters of the southern tributaries of the Ohio in 1671-1674. The Carolinians were across the Mississippi in 1700. Not to be outdone by their southern brethren, the Albany traders staged their little drama of westward extension. The rising action began with the appearance of nameless traders on the Great lakes in 1654 and continued for a decade, to reach its climax with Arnout Viele’s successful journey to the Cumberland river in 1692 and his triumphant return to Albany two years later.

Helen Broshar

Urbana, Illinois