 | It was a different time, with cultures that were resoundingly different from what we are used to. As I have previously read in Fred Anderson's book, The War that Made America, in the mid-18th century, certain Indians would "replenish" their populations by kidnapping people from other cultures or groups. That was definitely true when the French and the British invaded the area. This kidnapping, however, was intended to be adoption. Most of the adoptees into the tribes, though, were women and children. The Indians feared the men were more likely to resist, rebel, and kill to escape, so many of the men were left alone or left dead to deter anyone who might come looking for them. |
One source I read explained that some warriors would crack open and empty the skulls of the enemy and leave them sitting up with their own muskets protruding from their heads. This book, The War that Made America by Fred Anderson, tones down the gory details, but still does not hesitate to say that these were acts of terror.
The frontiers of the central colonies collapsed when the first parties of Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo warriors left their Ohio villages in the company of troupes de la marine and French-allied Indians from the Great Lakes who had gathered at Fort Dusquesne. Their descent on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia reflected a cold calculus of terror, for the goal was to bring anarchy to backwoods communities that even in time of peace were fragile, unstable, and intensely localist in orientation. The fifteen hundred frontier farmers whom the raiders killed and the additional thousand whom they took captive during the last months of 1755 served the strategic purpose of terrorizing hundreds of thousands of white settlers and creating a massive refugee crisis to which colonial governments were utterly unprepared to respond.
As for those who were kidnapped or adopted, many found new, peaceful homes with the Indians - something Anderson called "permanent transculturation" - to the point that they did not want to return to their European roots.
...Mary Jemison, who was fifteen or sixteen when Shawnee raiders took her captive in Pennsylvania in 1758, married Sheninjee, a Delaware warrior, in 1759 and bore him two children, a daughter who died in infancy and a son. When Sheninjee died, she married another warrior - a Seneca named Hiokatoo (or Gardow) - with whom she had six more children. They remained man and wife for fifty years. Mary never forgot her origins and gave her children English names...but became in every other sense a Seneca. She refused to leave her people when offered the chance to do so, as did many captives at the end of the war...
We would not understand these tactics of retaining population and power today - at least not in the United States - though their remain cultures that would. In fact, these are not the stories that we normally consider when studying wars in history. It serves to remind us that the French and Indian War was fought on cultural fronts as well as with military firefights.
I am reading this book, The War that Made America, to prepare for my week-long Teacher Institution
at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, during the summer of 2019.
Follow the link to my Fort Ticonderoga page for more.
at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, during the summer of 2019.
Follow the link to my Fort Ticonderoga page for more.
