Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/528

508 The great Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant — Thayandanegea — went to England, in 1785, to obtain compensation for the losses of his people. There are intimations that he conferred with crown officers on a plan of his own for confederating the Western Indian tribes — as Pontiac had done twenty years before — whether for war or peace. He sounded the Government of Britain as to help in that design, and obtained the promise of it. England justified her delay in yielding up the Western posts, — Niagara, Detroit, etc., — on the plea that we had not secured, as agreed, compensation to unarmed Loyalists for losses during the war. Our Congress had agreed to ask, not to secure, this compensation, for it could not coerce the separate States which alone held the purse-strings. So the Indians, countenanced and aided by the English, kept up hostilities at the West. They maintained that the Ohio must be the boundary, and that we should not cross it. They protested against separate treaties with separate tribes by which their lands were alienated by piece-meal. This was at a council held at Huron, a village near Detroit. Our “Thirteen Council Fires” made the chiefs long for an imitation in a confederacy of their own. So a temporary result of a conference with them was attested by the emblems, symbols, or totems of several nations, not as formerly by the names of chiefs. A proposed general Indian council in 1788 was a failure. But a somewhat successful treaty at Fort Harmar in January, 1789, broke or deferred the Indian confederacy.

Our Government authorities knew all the while, that, in all the vexations, embarrassments, and opposition in their first attempted pacifying and covenanting with the wild tribes, English officials, when not openly, were always secretly plying the Indians mischievously with encouragement and aid. This was understood to be one of the remaining grudges of the war. It was the policy of our Government to divide the tribes by jealousies of each