In 1792 James Seagrove, a U.S. commissioner of Indian Affairs, described conditions in Creek country: “The great drought which hath been all this Summer with the Creek nation & also the upper part of this Country, makes a famine much dreaded. I find I shall be obliged to give those Indians Corn to carry home with them to prevent their families from starving.” Seagrove warned that “unless assistance is given by the United States in this way … many of the unfortunate people of the Creek nation must perish as their crops of Corn are nearly destroyed.” He wondered “whether it would not be policy as well as great humanity in our Government to send a supply of Corn from the Northward.… It cannot be had in Georgia at any price.” Seagrove was writing to the secretary of war, and he stressed the immediate relevance of potential armed conflict. “Should a change of affairs make it necessary to assemble a force on this frontier (at this time) they must be fed from some other country than Georgia.”¹

Seagrove was paranoid and perhaps uninformed. He said that drought had demolished Creek corn, and the separate “country” of Georgia was unable or unwilling to assist with a delivery of food aid. Seagrove slipped from discussing food relief into anticipating a frontier campaign, suggesting that he associated unfed Indians with violence. He described a drought, but he warned about a future famine rather than a current one. He made no mention of Indian food reserves, such as the Creek houses containing whole rooms for storing corn, potatoes, and other vegetables, in addition to nuts, dried grapes, and persimmons.² Creeks might have been on the brink of famine, but they might also have been metaphorically describing their hungriness to Seagrove. In any case, it is evident that Seagrove’s fears of Indian starvation informed his assessment of Indian relations, which in turn influenced his opinions about best practices for federal policy. After the Revolutionary War, Native Americans increased their authority by working with the U.S. government to circumvent hunger. The federal government failed to win power because it cost so much to distribute food aid, and the government was not yet powerful enough to refuse to do so.

Postwar Indian country was a place of simultaneous resilience and desolation; although burned villages and scattered tribes provide plentiful evidence of disruption, there were numerous sites where Indian power waxed, at least until the mid-1790s.³ Approaches to Indian affairs, which included food policy, varied from state to state and evolved in three separate regions in the 1780s and 1790s: the southern states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, the mid-Atlantic states of New York and Pennsylvania, and the old northwest region of the Ohio Valley. Food negotiations reveal similarities between federal and state approaches, but also demonstrate that it was the competition between the states and the federal government that by 1795 left Native Americans more willing to accommodate U.S. officials in a joint cooperative fight against hunger.

In the southern region, from the Battle of Yorktown until 1785, much remained the same: officials built their food diplomacy on promises of food and food metaphors, rather than the physical article, and continued to point to scorched Cherokee villages as threats when dealing with the Creeks. Southern Natives persisted in stealing animals and attacking state inhabitants. During the war American and British officials prevented each other from practicing diplomacy; after it, southern states interfered with each other instead. When, in 1785, the United States appointed its own Indian commissioners, southern officials and U.S. officials began to compete with each other for Native loyalties—often by trying to block each other’s access to Indians.

Further north and northwest, the British undermined American negotiations with Indians—a tactic that did not last. By the 1790s, U.S. Indian agents had conducted enough research about protocol to know that feeding Indians depended on more than merely satisfying hunger. They used this new knowledge to replicate British diplomacy, and also tried and largely failed to curtail Native consumption and its costs. In the Ohio Valley region American food diplomacy failed among Western Confederacy Indians, though more as a result of British interference than because of American ineptitude. Western Confederacy Natives’ victual warfare evolved from a defensive strategy that involved the destruction of their own foodstuffs to an offensive strategy built on attacking American soldiers’ food convoys. Non-Native officials learned the costs of waging a losing war against Indian enemies and the continuing effectiveness of scorched-earth campaigns. They discovered how to transition from generous distributions of foodstuffs at treaties to stinginess. They also began to take seriously the Native women—particularly Creek and Iroquois women—who appear in the archival records during these decades.

The overarching theme for the 1780s and 1790s is that of the unexpected: Native Americans refused or ruined provisions when non-Natives thought they needed them, and ate too much when officials tried to reduce food aid. These unanticipated reactions to hunger underscore the need to reassess contemporary claims about hungry Indians so that power relations can be described more accurately. Negotiations in the north show that supplying the Iroquois with food went beyond preventing starvation; diplomats had to practice proper etiquette and overfeed Indians too. Western Confederacy Indians destroyed rather than stole food, which emphasized their continuing ability to go without it. To some extent they could wreck American foodstuffs because they received provisions from the British, but it is crucial to note that the Indians who welcomed British beef, pork, and corn did not always welcome British advice. British food aid failed to give the British the degree of influence over Indians that they might have liked. Non-Native southerners’ attempts to invoke white hunger to obtain Creek and Cherokee lands provoked a set of Indian responses that ranged from outbreaks of animal theft to accepting state officials’ treaty hospitality while ignoring their demands for land.

The transfer of power from Britain to the United States was not smooth in the north. In 1783 British-allied Iroquois lived in three clusters: at Loyal Village, south of Fort Niagara, at Buffalo Creek, close to where Lake Erie met the Niagara River, and at Cattaraugus, near the bottom of the southeast tip of Lake Erie. Migrations were underway. The American-allied Oneidas who remained to the south of Oneida Lake gradually lost territory to land-hungry white inhabitants. Senecas remained in the Genesee Valley. In 1784 the British purchased 2,842,480 acres of land from Mississauga Indians. This territory ran “about Six Miles on each Side of the Grand River called Oswego.” Mohawk Molly Brant’s brother, Joseph Brant, tried to convince the Iroquois to unify at this waterway, but when he deferred to the clan matrons, they chose instead to split the Six Nations—Brant’s Mohawk faction would reside on the British side of the Niagara boundary line, near Grand River, and the other half would live on the American side. The Treaty of Stanwix between some Iroquois and the United States, also in 1784, further divided the Six Nations by pleasing the Oneidas and angering Buffalo Creek Iroquois because it dispossessed them of their villages at Cattaraugus.⁴

The British, in violation of 1783 peace terms between Britain and the United States, maintained their forts in Upper Canada because Indians threatened bloodshed if the British surrendered them. British officials continued to cultivate Indian goodwill by providing meat, grain, and alcohol to satisfy commodity- and gift-exchange expectations. In July 1783 Frederick Haldimand, who had tried to reduce Iroquois eating after the Sullivan Campaign, received requests from his men for flour, pork, and butter supplies at Niagara, Carleton Island, and Detroit. These provisioners assumed they would “Continue to Victuall the Same Number of Troops and Indians we have done.” At Niagara, some three thousand Indians collected rations each day in August. The Mohawks in Montreal received fresh meat (which they likely preferred) rather than salted because of “a Scarcity of Salt,” and their “small Allowance of Rum” continued “as usual.”⁵

Upon moving into Grand River in 1784, Brant asked the British to “assist them with a reasonable Quantity of Provisions.” That same year Frederick Haldimand asked Brant to find out what American “Commissioners from Congress” were saying, and to “report the same to him.” Brant provided the information in exchange for provisions, but he also procured food for his people by other means: by encouraging non-Natives—mostly Loyalists—to settle and farm at Grand River, where they paid Mohawks rent with the produce they raised.⁶ Many Iroquois men and women in the 1780s thus prevented the tribe’s hunger—as they had before the Revolutionary War—with rent paid to them in crops and garden produce, which they supplemented with British rations.

Britons frustrated would-be American diplomats by thwarting their attempts to negotiate with Indians. In August 1783, U.S. commissioners tried to reach the Iroquois, bringing boats “Loaded with Rum to trade at the Upper Posts” and documents granting passage from New York officials. British brigadier general Allan Maclean refused to grant them passage through Niagara and was pleased to report that one of “Our Indian friends,” mistaking an Englishmen for one of the American commissioners, drunkenly asked him, “You damn Yankee what brought you here.”⁷ The rum was important in this instance because it might have been used to open meetings at the welcoming ceremonies that forest diplomacy required. Gifts of food and drink had long featured at such negotiations, but they nearly always began with a symbolic drink. Blocking American rum prevented the meeting from starting and made future encounters more difficult. Officers happily related instances when Indians critiqued Americans—even if they mistakenly identified their nationalities.

At the federal level U.S. Indian policy was one of conquest. At the 1784 Treaty of Stanwix—which bore little resemblance to its 1768 namesake—the Americans made it clear that they expected fealty, obedience, and land from the Iroquois. They confirmed Haldimand’s worries about the 1783 peace treaty between Britain and the United States, observing that in that agreement, “no mention [was] made by the King of Great Britain of any Indian nation or tribe whatsoever.”⁸ “You are a subdued people,” the Americans crowed. “You have been overcome in a war which you entered into with us, not only without provocation but in violation of the most sacred obligations.” American commissioners at Fort McIntosh in 1785, similarly, told Chippewas, Delawares, Ottawas, and Wyandots, “we claim the Country by conquest, and are to give not to receive.”⁹ These were rhetorical tricks. Because they had not considered themselves subjects of Great Britain, Indians disagreed that they shared the same fate of the country the Americans had defeated.

Fortunately for Native Americans, the early U.S. government lacked the organization to enforce this cant of conquest under the Articles of Confederation, which were ineffective in the realms of foreign and domestic policy. Congress did not establish a Department of Foreign Affairs until 1781, when it consisted of a secretary and four employees; the secretary could attend Congressional sessions but was barred from asking questions and proposing actions. The short-lived post gave way to the secretary of state, whose role expanded at a much slower pace than roles in other departments. The Articles made it tough for the federal government to levy domestic taxes, which left little in the way of funds for the presents and provisions of foreign treaties with Indians, and still less to pay soldiers to go to war against Native Americans. U.S. officials who wanted an advantage over individual states thought about both of these options, which remained important to agents like James Seagrove even after the Constitution replaced the Articles. The Articles prevailed until 1789 (1788 in New York). Without sufficient financial and military capabilities, the federal government had to backpedal on this position of transferred sovereignty by the mid-1780s.¹⁰

When politicians realized that they did not possess the leverage to make unequivocal demands, they tried to improve relations with Indians while the Articles of Confederation stood. In March 1785 Congress passed an act appointing United States Indian commissioners.¹¹ Federal politicians knew that they needed to prevent settler colonial and state landgrabs, and to counter the overtures from other imperial powers—the British among the Iroquois, and the Spanish and British among the Creeks and Cherokees.¹² The problem, however, was that state commissioners were bound to butt heads with U.S. agents as they competed for Indians’ attention.

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress’s power to manage Indian relations covered only Indians who were not “members” of the thirteen extant states. State officials, who could expand their state’s geography during boundary disputes with other states, stood to benefit. Native Americans would have laughed at the idea of belonging to a state—it would have been more accurate to say that states belonged in Indian country—but the states nevertheless asserted authority over the federal government in their dealings with Indians because they assumed that direct dealings with Indians would yield more favorable land cessions. Some made more effective efforts than others to establish good relations. New York governor George Clinton studied the treaty diplomacy of opening ceremonies, speeches, wampum use, private conferences, and presents to ingratiate his state with the Iroquois. New York’s congressmen claimed the Six Nations as their own and tried to interfere with treaty negotiations from Stanwix onward. In 1785, the Seneca Cornplanter moved his faction away from Buffalo Creek to two villages near the western portion of the New York-Pennsylvania border. When the national capital moved to Philadelphia in late 1790, Cornplanter’s followers enjoyed better access to federal Indian officials.¹³

State and federal policies evolved against a backdrop of environmental changes. Crops failed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and the area in present-day Canada from Niagara to Quebec and into the Maritimes in 1782, 1784, 1787, 1788, and 1789. Drought and crop failures in 1785, 1789, 1791, 1792, and 1794 also pervade the sources on Cherokees and Creeks. At times Iroquois clan mothers pressured other Indians into ceding land because they wanted “peace and food relief, which hinged upon the state’s goodwill,” as they did in 1785 at Fort Herkimer. The 1789 crop failures resulted from the return of the Hessian fly in 1788, which destroyed the wheat harvest. Shortages became evident after a cold 1789 spring and worsened after rumors sparked a surge in grain prices. Native Americans had delayed their planting that year because relations with non-Natives were so bad that they feared a repeat of the 1779 campaign.¹⁴

Yet previous Iroquois actions—such as destroying British foodstuffs or refusing British provisions—suggest that Indians’ eating habits were more complicated than mere dependency on food aid to address hunger. The Iroquois may have treated with New Yorkers because New Yorkers provided food aid, but they might also have treated with New Yorkers because New Yorkers were good at practicing other types of diplomacy. Stored corn reserves should also be considered in assessing the extent of Indian hunger, because the Hessian fly eats wheat, barley, and rye, but not corn.¹⁵

The diplomacy of federal officials suggests that distributing provisions at the proper time and place was just as important as providing a lot of food; these were not uniformly starving Indians gorging on provisions. Six Nations housed at Buffalo Creek and led at various points by Captain Pollard, Cornplanter, Farmer’s Brother, Red Jacket, and Young King spent time teaching food protocols to federal agents, implying their willingness to work with those agents, first, in addition to state ones, and eventually, instead of them.¹⁶ In the 1790s these federal officials replicated previous British and Indian practices. The Iroquois did not destroy foodstuffs or demand that Americans hunger alongside them, but as they did during the Revolutionary War, they shaped the diplomacy that non-Natives practiced to address Indian hunger.

When he began work as a federal Indian commissioner, future secretary of war Timothy Pickering required instruction from Natives. He began his education before a meeting to cover the graves of two murdered Seneca men. Pennsylvania footed the bill for the condolence presents, but the U.S. government assumed the more expensive cost of hosting the council. As he prepared to meet Senecas in November 1790, Pickering received a message from Indian runners. Little Billy informed him of the impending arrival of a large number of Senecas. He asked Pickering to have “provisions prepared for them” at two locations called the Painted Post and Newtown Point. Little Billy depicted this act of “hang[ing] some kettles” as one of “Antiant customs.” In addition, he requested “a little Staff” or “walking staff.” The kettles symbolized food—sometimes grain, sometimes meat, sometimes cooked, sometimes not—and the staff was watered-down alcohol.¹⁷

The British would already have known to anticipate these customs of providing for Indians as they journeyed to and from meetings. Pickering cautiously stepped into a similar negotiator’s role. He promised to “have ready plenty of beef, flour & corn … and Some rum,” but warned that “the provisions furnished at those two places can be no more than what will be absolutely necessary to enable them to come on to this place.”¹⁸ Like Jeffery Amherst and Frederick Haldimand, Timothy Pickering tried to limit Indians’ consumption. Soon he too would learn the error of attempting to do so.

After sending this message Pickering panicked because he worried that dissatisfied Senecas would commit victual warfare. New York resident Bezaleel Seely told Pickering that Indians dealing with a “lack of Provisions” could be found “killing & pilfering” the “property” belonging to the town’s inhabitants. Seely did not appear to know that Indians took foodstuffs because they expected them as part of hospitality, but he was sure that thefts of animals and vegetables would provoke retaliation. Rumors “that the Indians were coming on in good humour” made Pickering anxious to keep them that way, “and apprehensive that the restricted provision … would be insufficient,” he dispatched someone “to procure all necessary additional Supplies” to contend with the Senecas’ “voracious eating.”¹⁹ Even during this period of relative calm, Pickering, like James Seagrove, feared the violent result of ignoring Native hunger.

Once everyone arrived and observed the condolence ceremony together, Farmer’s Brother put Pickering in an awkward situation. After Pickering had welcomed the Seneca men, Farmer’s Brother observed, “Our women expect you will Show them equal attention … you may See one who may please you.” Although Indian agents frequently enjoyed the sexual company of Native women, Pickering declined the offer. The invitation evoked “a general laugh” from those present, though records do not indicate how the Seneca women reacted. They would have attended and influenced the outcome of such meetings before the Revolutionary War, but since the 1760s men like Sir William Johnson had tried to silence the women who participated. Pickering’s response was crucial. He dealt with the situation not by accepting sexual gifts but by offering consumable items. “I invite you to my quarters, where we may eat & drink together in friendship,” Pickering recorded telling the women. And walking around and shaking hands “with every woman present,” Pickering said, “I now take you by the hand as my sisters.”²⁰ He showed respect to the Senecas by inviting them to dine. By calling them his sisters he evoked a kinship metaphor that negated sexual overtures and acknowledged the bargaining position of Native women.

It is possible that Pickering assumed he had won control of the situation while the Indians assumed that Pickering was a generous host. Ultimately he had to study “to please” the Indians “in every thing,” provisioning 220 people at a cost of £150.²¹ During this moment, six years after American commissioners told the Iroquois that they had defeated them, federal agents scrambled to build relationships with Senecas. The balance of power remained uncertain.

Americans continued to try to improve their behavior at future meetings, and this research on diplomatic practices yielded additional opinions on Native tastes, diet, and hungriness. American-allied Natives such as Captain Hendrick Aupaumut, a Stockbridge Mahican, assessed the sorts of provisions non-Natives could supply. His observation that Indians preferred pork to beef confirmed earlier British claims. Benjamin Rush, the renowned American doctor, sent Timothy Pickering questions about Indians, including queries about diet. Pickering described Indians’ alimentary (and sometimes excretory) habits, relating that those who had eaten “often, & a great deal” experienced “excretions by Stools … more frequent than those of the white people.” He explained that Indians handled food shortages by “tying their belts closer & closer” and eating “Spikenard root, which allays hunger.” In preparation for such periods, Indians ate “two or three pounds of beef a man per day, besides bread and vegetables” when they could get them.²²

Observers were struck by the fact that, compared to white soldiers, Indians could eat two to three times the quantity of meat. When Henry Knox received a letter about Native appetites, his correspondent underlined the fact that each person “expects double rations.”²³ These post-Revolutionary studies reveal two non-Native perceptions of Indian hunger: first, that Indian appetites were at times greater than those of non-Natives, and second, that Indians could deal with hunger but could not stop it from happening. Such details drove government decisions to spend a lot of time and money on Indian affairs.

During most meetings Indians held the advantage. In the summer of 1791 Pickering was supposed to meet the Senecas again, this time in the company of a number of other Iroquois Indians on the Tioga River. It was at this event that Pickering delivered his false history of early English industry and Native American starvation. Once more, before the gathering Seneca messengers asked Pickering “to hang on the kettles & furnish them with a walking Staff” at a certain location. Pickering responded that it would “be exceedingly difficult” to fulfill their request because “the lowness of the water of the Tioga river” made “the goods and provisions” impossible to transport without getting horses and oxen to drag canoes behind them. In what he thought was a compromise Pickering proposed to hang the kettles fifteen miles closer, where the Indians would find “beef & corn in plenty … a quantity of potatoes,” and a “walking Staff.” When the Indians arrived, the Oneida named Good Peter chided Pickering, supposing “that the business of holding treaties with Indians was novel to me, or I should have hung on the kittles for their refreshment.”²⁴

Good Peter implied that although Pickering had provided the walking staff, he needed to study up on food distributions, and he guilted Pickering by saying that he had been “obliged to ask for provisions at Canadasago.” Chastised, Pickering paid Good Peter for the food the Indians had purchased. He also had to listen to the Seneca Red Jacket’s assessment of his history lesson. Red Jacket criticized Pickering for a “discourse … intermixed with friendship and trouble.” “In ancient times,” Red Jacket remembered, “We did not repeat misfortunes, when brightening the chain” of friendship.²⁵ Red Jacket did not explicitly call Pickering a liar, but he disagreed with Pickering’s approach to recalling the past when practicing diplomacy. This meeting included 1,050 Iroquois. At its end Pickering sent them home with “one barrel of rum for a walking Staff” and a promise of “hanging on the kettles for them at Sundry places.” Despite the fact that “the great expences of the treaty mortif[ied]” him, Pickering salvaged the situation.²⁶

Additional exchanges of food continued throughout the 1790s. In 1790 a small number of Senecas—Cornplanter, Half-Town, Great Tree, Guyasuta, and two others—went to Philadelphia for a visit that lasted from October to March while they met with federal and state officials. In 1791 Timothy Pickering again invited “four, five or Six … of their most able & prudent chiefs” to Philadelphia. A larger group of Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora Iroquois met federal officials in Philadelphia in 1792, staying for over a month.²⁷ In sum, large numbers of Indians proved willing to meet with American officials because those officials seemed amenable to learning Indian diplomacy, which in turn familiarized non-Natives with Native abilities to withstand hunger—but not stop its occurrence.

Southern officials also scrutinized and sometimes misunderstood Indian appetites. Cherokees and Creeks requested provisions from state and federal officials, who proved quick to compete with each other in their quests for Native land. Almost immediately after the appointment of federal commissioners, states began trying to outdo federal negotiators. In June 1785 one Georgia assemblyman learned that Creeks led by the Tallassee King and the Fat King were headed toward Beard’s Bluff, “with a request that we would have provisions ready for them.” The meeting was intended to settle a “boundary line” between Georgia and Creek territory. Georgians said that the meeting was “of the first Consequence to the state … as the Commissioners from Congress will shortly be on the same errand.” “If we get through with this before they Commence,” Georgians speculated, “it may be a capital point gained.”²⁸ These records reveal that Creeks, like the Iroquois, expected people to provide food on their way to a meeting, that some non-Natives knew about these protocols, and that state officials were animated by a spirit of competition against the federal government. State representatives needed to negotiate separately with the Creeks—and wanted provisions as part of this process—because their delimitation of land boundaries differed from the U.S. government’s. Small wonder that James Seagrove thought of Georgia as a separate country a few years later.

Other state politicians also championed their own interests. Before a 1789 meeting with Creeks and Cherokees, William Blount, North Carolina state senator, argued that because the Cherokees were “the only Indians that are troublesome to here,” state commissioner John Steele needed to speak to them first because “such as are first treated with fare best as to Provisions and Presents.” If Steele prioritized this meeting, North Carolina could potentially sign “a better Treaty” with them. Blount separated provisions from presents but acknowledged that hospitality and treaty gifts were both necessary to lead to an outcome beneficial to the state. The U.S. Congress, however, had anticipated North Carolina’s actions, and had “absolutely forbidden” state commissioners from demanding land.²⁹ This order meant that even if North Carolinians succeeded in reaching the Cherokees before U.S. officials did, there was little for the state to gain.

In contrast to the northern states, southern state inhabitants seemed to expect more violence between Natives and non-Natives. “We shall make their Towns Smoak with fire, and their Streets run with blood—the whole will be consumed in one general conflagation [sic],” promised Georgia governor George Handley in 1788. State campaigns continued to focus on burning Native villages, and white inhabitants’ domesticated animals destroyed the crops untouched by soldiers’ firebrands. By 1790 it had grown difficult for southern state agents to maintain the fiction that they cared about Indians’ interests. That year, the Intercourse Act prohibited land sales between Indians and individuals and between Indians and the states, supposedly establishing the federal government as the sole entity capable of signing treaties with Indians.³⁰

As in the north, federal officials in the south nurtured Indian alliances because they feared Indian hunger and because they worried about the growing influence of the states. By spring of 1786 reports of Indians stealing horses appeared in North Carolina. Accounts from 1787 depicted Chickamauga Cherokees and Creeks cutting down crops, stealing horses, killing hogs and cattle, and murdering white inhabitants. Additional intelligence circulated into the 1790s. It is not coincidental that reports of crop failure and Indian starvation were both prevalent during this time. In 1792 U.S. commissioner James Seagrove suggested to Secretary of War Henry Knox that the United States needed to supply corn to Creeks to prevent famine. By 1794 other officials worried about starving Cherokees. In August 1792 Knox had Seagrove relocate to Creek country to counteract dissension with “Goods, Corn, and Money.”³¹

Although the expense of feeding Indians increased, and although federal agents remained worried about Indian violence and interference from the states, they remained unable to reduce the amounts of provisions they provided. After a 1786 meeting with Cherokees, Andrew Pickens, Benjamin Hawkins, and Josiah Martin said that to prevent them from “starving, through indolence,” they would work with the Cherokees’ interpreter and four chiefs to facilitate their “procuring provisions” on their way home. They had also “supplied them with provisions on the road” to the meeting.³² These men supplied food even to the Indians they characterized as lazy.

Seagrove attempted to regulate food distribution in 1791. When the U.S. government agreed to send corn from Philadelphia for Creek consumption, Seagrove informed them that in order to obtain the corn, the Creeks would have to come to him. Once met, they would “make arrangements for distributing the provision … Which your people can receive at any time afterwards.” Seagrove, unlike his British counterparts, did not envision a food-aid system in which officials visited villages to distribute provisions. He tried to prevent the appearance of the women and children who usually accompanied men to meetings—and thus the additional cost of hosting them. “No greater number than what I have mentioned may attend at our meeting,” he wrote, “as a croud of people only prevent business being done.”³³

Nine months later, given the “Critical situation at this juncture,” Seagrove explained that he had “been obliged” to accommodate Creeks’ “craving dispositions” because he “thought it would be bad policy to fall out with those people, and let them go home discontented.” No one “who is not an Eyewitness to the enormous eating of Indians can have an Idea of it,” he wrote. At one point Seagrove tried to limit Creeks to the equivalent of military meat rations: “a pound of Beef [per] Man each day, but found it would not do.” The Indians “got out of all tempter with that mode, and threatened to leave me, if I would not give them their belly’s full.” “There is no middle road with these people,” he warned. “So soon as the United States decline purchasing their friendship as above; I would recommend by all means that they have a force ready to oppose them in the field.”³⁴ Here again, Seagrove associated empty bellies with the need for violence. His anxiety helps explain why men like Hawkins and Pickens were so ready to provision Native Americans.

One of the definitive battles over the future of southern Indian relations occurred not between Native Americans and federal officials, but between federal and Georgian agents. Readers may be familiar with the fight over federal versus state power in the 1820s, which preceded Cherokee removal in the 1830s. Conflict between the states and the federal government was also evident decades earlier, at the 1796 Treaty of Colerain between U.S. commissioners, Georgia commissioners, and Creek Indians. Although discussions at the treaty involved land, it was also a food fight in which Georgians invoked their own hunger in a gambit for Creek territory.

In 1796, in an effort to broker peace in the midst of Georgians’ unscrupulous dealings in the Yazoo Land Fraud—in which former governor George Mathews and other Georgian politicians sold territory in present-day Alabama and Mississippi to their friends at low prices—the United States and Georgia acted together. They invited the Creeks to a treaty at Colerain, on the St. Mary’s River. In April, James Seagrove, by now the superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Creek nation, sent a talk to the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles that requested their attendance. George Clymer, Benjamin Hawkins, and Andrew Pickens joined him as U.S. agents—they were from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina, respectively. James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms acted for Georgia. Seagrove remained invested in cutting costs: “Plenty of every thing that is good will be provided,” he promised Creeks before the meeting, but only for “The principal men of every Town.” The season was “a time of the year when you seldom go a hunting,” he argued, so the men could “leave your Women and young people to make your Corn.”³⁵ Seagrove anticipated Indians’ excuses for not coming to the treaty and preempted them, and he also tried to limit attendance.

The Georgia commissioners, meanwhile, planned to outdo federal agents, sending periodic reports to the governor, Jared Irwin. Georgia’s commissioners expected 7,000 Indians and were ready to host them. State agents examined “various accounts of the quantity of Beef an Indian would devour.” After learning “that from five to seven pounds were daily given them,” they figured that each Indian probably ate three rations and “wasted or jerked” the remainder “for the Nation.” The state’s figures for Indian meat consumption were higher than those for the Iroquois and higher than Seagrove and Pickering had previously reported. Georgia’s contractor had to make additional trips for extra provisions once state agents made their estimates. Georgians at Colerain were prepared to be generous even though they were paying for half the costs of treaty provisions. Luckily for Southern budgets, the Indians’ numbers came closer to 430 than 7,000, including 31 women and 29 children.³⁶ Creeks ignored U.S. commissioners’ instructions to leave their women and children at home, temporarily giving Georgia the advantage of appearing more welcoming.

U.S. commissioners, like the British around Niagara, tried to control other officials’ access to Indians. On May 31 Georgians denounced the orders that Hawkins and Clymer posted on the garrison gates: U.S. agents had decided that no man could speak to the Creeks without a permit issued by one of them. Other regulations forbade people from selling or gifting alcohol, or engaging in “any Commercial Traffic” with Indians. The Georgians countered that the treaty grounds stood in Georgia, “under the actual jurisdiction of the State.” Benjamin Hawkins replied that Georgian authority was subservient to federal authority.³⁷ U.S. commissioners, by asserting federal power in trade negotiations with Indians and standing between the Georgians and the Creeks, circumscribed Georgians’ maneuvering through forest diplomacy.

Although the Georgians arrived at Colerain ready to feed the Creeks, they came to the treaty unprepared to present an acceptable talk: they intended to demand serious concessions from the Indians while misusing a hunger metaphor. In a calculated move, U.S. commissioners “helped” by reading and approving the offensive speech before the Georgians delivered it. Georgians later claimed that Seagrove had undermined state authority by holding a private meeting with the Creeks at his residence at Muscogee, “where the Commissioners of Georgia, owing to the regulations before protested against, had no access.”³⁸

Notes from the actual recitation of the speech do not exist in the state commissioners’ papers, so one must read the draft talk while imagining Native reactions to it. Before the treaty began, the state commissioners had collected lists of the slaves, cattle, hogs, and horses taken in acts of revolutionary victual warfare from all the counties in Georgia. They began their message with a demand that Indians return bondpeople and animals, and then continued:

The Nation which has fewest people & most land, ought to part with a little of it, to the other nation at a reasonable price … we have not land enough, to raise corn for all our people.… No Red man would refuse a white man something to eat, if he came hungry to his Cabin, and yet a refusal of this land, will be like a denial of bread to many hungry families, who want to raise corn on it, to feed themselves … your hunts we are told are not very profitable on this land … it is fit for the purpose we want it … to raise corn for our hungry people.… We have brought you a large parcel of goods … if we can agree about the land.… They will comfort your Wives & Children, & will be of more value to you, than the profits of many years hunts, on the lands we wish to get from you.³⁹

The speech blended American and Native ideas. The Georgians suggested that the Creeks should cede land to be hospitable and because they could sympathize with non-Native hunger. The talk relied on figurative language (“like a denial of bread”), which, though not a precise one-dish simile, would probably have been recognizable. But the Georgians erred by suggesting that Creeks only hunted and non-Natives only farmed, by privileging Georgian hunger over Creek hunger, and by asking for a reversal of victual warfare in the return of domesticated animals and ex-bondpeople.

Given the ineffectiveness of metaphorical food diplomacy, the maneuvering of U.S. officials, and the long history of violence in Georgia, the odds were stacked against the state commissioners, despite the extensive and generous provisioning plans they had made for the treaty. Georgian officials’ ability to keep treaty attendees from going hungry would not make them capable of making everyone happy.

On June 18, 1796, the Creeks gathered in the treaty square (or tcoko-thlako) appointed by the U.S. commissioners to hear what the Georgians would say. Later the Georgians related that during their oration, Creek women appeared, joined by the wives of George Clymer and James Seagrove. State commissioners observed that “not one of them were present” when federal agents spoke the previous day. Creeks and U.S. officials would have known that women could not enter the square ground while men were still deliberating, and thus their presence indicated the end of negotiations.⁴⁰ The Creek women who came to the Treaty of Colerain implicitly supported the efforts of the U.S. commissioners and undermined the Georgians’ efforts by occupying a traditionally male space. The Georgians obliviously proceeded to deliver their talk and then retired to await the Creeks’ response.

Benjamin Hawkins, who anticipated the impending clash, waited four days to tell Georgia’s commissioners “what the Indians had done.” The Creeks had produced a reply unfit for Georgians’ ears. They renounced previous treaties at which they had not been united—among them the treaties of Augusta (1783), Galphinton (1785), and Shoulderbone (1786). They had repudiated these treaties at the Treaty of New York in 1790, which transferred jurisdiction to federal officials. They seemed to think Georgia needed to be reminded of these repudiations. The Creeks cited their return of some bondpeople and said they would return others. Most importantly, they argued that at the Treaty of New York, Creeks had been “assured by the President of the United States and his Congress that no more demands should be made for Indians lands.” The Creeks’ answer, mediated through the American commissioners, and all the more shocking for their refusal to deliver it aloud, denied Georgians the cession they requested. Although Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms objected, Hawkins informed them, “no other answer might be eafected but thro the Commissers. of the United States.”⁴¹

Then the Creeks took the Georgians’ hunger metaphors and threw them back at them. They claimed that “both sides” stole and maimed hogs and cattle, and that it was unfair for only Creeks to return war spoils. The Indians detailed their land-use and hunger-prevention efforts: “the very streams of water are found valuable for Mills to grind the wheat & Corn that is made on those lands.” Dead pine trees yielded tar. Furthermore, the goods the Georgians gave them on previous occasions had turned “rotten & gone to nothing.”⁴² The Creeks reminded Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms that they did farm, and emphasized their production of non-Native wheat as well as Indian maize. They needed their land for crop production. Their statement that the Georgians gave them useless goods symbolized their lack of faith in the state at this treaty and at future meetings. The huge quantities of food that Georgia had supplied for the treaty had done nothing to obtain what the state commissioners might have considered a good deal.

Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms decided that their only recourse was to refuse the written talk and to ask for an oral response from the Creeks, who received them the following day. During this interaction, the state commissioners protested that it was not their fault that the goods were rotten, especially because the Creeks neglected to say so at the time they received them and “sold us the land for them.” The state representatives considered that contract binding and pressed once more for a cession: “We told you of the goods we brought … they amount to 20,000 Dollars at least.… This will more than pay you for the loss of skins and meat” the Indians garnered “from that land.” “It will do you good and make us all friends,” they concluded optimistically. After this exchange the Creeks remained silent, and on the following day Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms once again demanded a reply. “We do not know what the people of Georgia wish to Learn,” complained a man called the Bird Tail King. “Do they think we have not given a determined answer?”⁴³

In the fight between American commissioners and Georgian ones, the U.S. agents had emerged triumphant. U.S. officials successfully blocked Georgians’ access to Indians, undermined talks crafted by the state agents, and cultivated the federal government’s relationship with the Creeks. Creek Indians reminded everybody that they needed land for their own agriculture. By the end of the treaty it became clear that Georgians could not succeed against the U.S. agents. The battle between U.S. Indian agents and Creeks was still to come. In the meantime, the federal government had more pressing concerns.

In addition to interfering with states’ diplomacy with Creeks, Cherokees, and the Iroquois, the federal government turned its attention to the Ohio Valley, where the Western Confederacy gathered strength. Diplomacy and warfare in the north and south retained familiar forms but passed from British to state to federal agents. In the Ohio Valley, by contrast, the British retained the upper hand in negotiations until 1795. A conflict called the Western Confederacy War (sometimes the Northwest Indian War) raged on past the War for Independence, consuming five-sixths of the federal budget between 1790 and 1795.⁴⁴ Victual warfare was different in this region. Natives burned their own crops, nearly always destroyed rather than stole American soldiers’ provisions, and accepted British meat and grain while ignoring British counseling. Their actions lend further specificity to evolving eighteenth-century ideas about hunger and suggest Indians’ abilities to retain power when short on food.

The Western Confederacy consisted of a number of Indian tribes—Chickamauga Cherokees, Chippewas, Conoys, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Iroquois, Miamis, Mingoes, Mahicans, Munsees, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Reynards, Sacs, Shawnees, and Wyandots—many of whom had been forging alliances since before the Revolution. Shawnees introduced Miamis to the British in the late 1740s. Delawares and Creeks possessed ties to the Shawnees. The Chickamauga Cherokees and Shawnees created an alliance after 1776. When the Shawnees sent the Chickamaugas a war hatchet in 1784, the Cherokees agreed to take hold of it. Americans’ massacre of pacifist Delawares at Gnadenhütten in 1782 brought Shawnees and Delawares closer together in desires for war. These tribes continued to develop support networks with the British. Around 1785, Huron and Ottawa (Wyandot) First Nations granted a tract of land at the mouth of the Detroit River to British Indian department officials Henry Bird, Matthew Elliott, Alexander McKee, and Simon Girty. By July 1787, while the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia to address the Articles of Confederation and the country’s inability to raise an army, “authentic information” circulated about “a confederation” of Indians “on the North West side of the Ohio [River].” A triumvirate led by Buckongahelas of the Delawares, Little Turtle of the Miamis, and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees bound the Indians together.⁴⁵ They possessed many grievances against the new United States.

During treaties at Fort McIntosh in 1785, Fort Finney in 1786, and Fort Harmar in 1789, U.S. officials demanded land while threatening to raze Western Confederacy villages. At Fort McIntosh Americans demanded territory from Delawares, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Wyandots. At Fort Finney Americans pressured 230 Shawnee men and women into ceding land, and despite other Shawnees’ repudiation of the treaty, Americans recognized cessions made without tribal consensus. At Fort Harmar the Americans met the Delawares, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Senecas, Sauks, and Wyandots. Officials warned that Indians who refused to engage with the Americans (and, by implication, to cede land to them) could “rest assured that the United States will take speedy and effectual measures to … reduce you to such terms, as may cause you to regret the loss of so advantageous a peace.” Between 1774 and 1794, Shawnee settlements suffered eight different assaults. One village called Chillicothe was attacked four times even though the Shawnees kept rebuilding it in different locations.⁴⁶ The Western Confederacy War became a conflict of ongoing attacks and retaliations.

Indians’ defensive tactics left them well positioned to undermine the Americans. In September 1790 the Miamis burned their own town rather than allow advancing American troops to do so. This preemptive destruction meant that American soldiers could take no corn; the Indians, on the other hand, could find game in the woods and shelter and stored grain in neighboring villages. Warriors divided into smaller self-sufficient groups of approximately twenty men, who fed themselves by hunting. Twelve hundred warriors could kill approximately two hundred deer and two hundred turkeys per day, making them less reliant on grain. Indians also continued to expect British assistance.⁴⁷

The Western Confederacy gathered power. In 1790 the Indians overcame American General Josiah Harmar and his men, and their 1791 face-off against Arthur St. Clair yielded another victory. Afterward, reports circulated of vindictive Indians stuffing dead soldiers’ mouths with soil in a symbolic act against those who hungered too deeply for Natives’ lands. The Confederacy worked to build alliances with southern Indians. In September 1792 Governor William Blount of Georgia wrote, “the Five lower towns of the Cherokees have declared War against the United States.” By October their numbers had been augmented by Upper Creeks. A 1792 meeting at the Glaize (the area in present-day Ohio where the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers meet) drew together Cherokees, Chippewas, Conoys, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Miamis, Mingoes, Mahicans, Munsees, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Reynards, Sacs, and Shawnees.⁴⁸

By this time the federal government was working to build up its military, and finally had a stronger apparatus to raise money for soldiers’ pay. Harmar’s campaign had consisted of militia and federal troops who lacked training; Arthur St. Clair’s men were similarly motley. When, in 1792, General “Mad” Anthony Wayne accepted command of the new American Legion, he did so with a vision of order. He drew on support from the new U.S. War Department (founded in 1789) and spent a year putting together supplies and men, whom he trained in guerrilla warfare.⁴⁹

In 1793 Wayne went on the defensive to protect his food supplies. “I am here under the order of the Commander in Chief, with a Strong Detachment of the Legion … to protect your beef Catle,” one general proclaimed to suppliers in November 1793. Wayne knew that he had to protect his supply line, which stretched over one hundred miles and proved difficult to maintain and defend. He stockpiled rations at Greenville and stored smaller caches at other forts. The War Department’s agreement with the contractors who provisioned the western posts contained stipulations that guards would escort food convoys and cattle, as well as agreements on financial compensation for “losses sustained by the depredations of the enemy.”⁵⁰ It was necessary to appoint cattle guards to fill soldiers’ stomachs in a timely manner.

As the Confederacy gained strength, their tactics shifted from the defensive to the offensive. Most information about their strategy came from William Wells, who was raised among the Miamis but turned spy for the Americans after 1793. Indians intended to target Americans’ “plenty of Cattle & Corn,” to attack Wayne’s provisions convoys, “to kill the pack horses” responsible for transporting said provisions, and “to harrass the Army by firing frequently upon them in the Night,” Wells warned. He was right; the Indians set fire to hay, making it hard for soldiers to feed horses, transport supplies, or reconnoiter the area, and they attacked and abandoned wagons loaded with corn. The Americans puzzled over the fact that Indians who struck at their convoys left edible goods behind, but Indians possessed little cause to steal food when they could hunt and when British officials such as Alexander McKee promised to keep them well fed. Many Americans may not have known about British support, so it is possible that the war further mythologized Native abilities to withstand food deprivation. Wayne’s assertion that “The Savages … can’t continue long embodied for want of provisions” was bluster.⁵¹ The Confederacy forsook supplies and interfered with Wayne’s operations.

While the Confederacy was fighting Wayne’s Legion, the United States also considered diplomatic mediations with those Indians. The British hoped to quash such efforts. A 1793 meeting at Sandusky, near Lake Erie, was U.S. officials’ last chance to try to agree on a boundary line with an increasingly capable enemy. Commissioners Benjamin Lincoln, Timothy Pickering, and Beverly Randolph possessed no way of knowing that the council would never take place. In February the War Department prepared to transport Madeira, port, rum, and sherry; beef, bread, butter, cheese, ham, and pickled pork; and chocolate, coffee, sugar, and tea.⁵²

The British set about blocking American food diplomacy and practicing it themselves. Since 1792 British governor John Graves Simcoe had lent military support to the Western Indians to protect British interests in the Ohio Valley. In 1793 Simcoe, possibly under influence from Joseph Brant, prohibited the United States officials from feeding Indians. If they received “their dinners from the party with whom they were treating,” Simcoe contended, Natives could not “treat on independent grounds.” The Indians “objected to … being supplied by the United States,” he concluded, ignoring half a century in which Britons had supplied dinner to Indians with whom they had negotiated. While Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph stayed with Simcoe, and then at British Indian commissioner Matthew Elliott’s house on the Detroit River, the Western Confederacy gathered at Alexander McKee’s storehouse at the bottom of the Maumee rapids.⁵³ The Confederacy never met the U.S. commissioners; instead, the two parties passed messages through British and Indian intermediaries.

In June 1793 the commissioners sent Mahican Hendrick Aupaumut to try to open negotiations by asking whether the Confederacy would cede the Ohio River as a boundary line between Indians and the United States; the Confederacy’s previous reluctance to do so had helped cause the war. The United States was offering “a large annual Rent” and permission to “hunt on the same lands as long as you can find any game.” Although the Western Confederacy split into two camps, a response came only from the Shawnees. Their answer was that they could “retreat no farther; because the Country behind, hardly affords food for its present inhabitants.” Money was “of no value” to them, and “no consideration whatever” would convince them “to Sell the Lands on which we get Sustenance for our women and children.” These Indians cited their hunting needs, and argued that the lands west of the Ohio would not support their additional numbers. The Shawnees sarcastically suggested taking the money the commissioners had proposed giving to the Indians and offering it instead to poor non-Native inhabitants to fund their relocation out of the Ohio Valley. The commissioners interpreted this response as representative of the whole Confederacy, making future conflict unavoidable.⁵⁴

British food diplomacy, meanwhile, continued uninterrupted. In 1791 Hendrick Aupaumut reported that the British were encouraging the Shawnees’ and Miamis’ desire for war by promising “three years provision.” An interpreter reported that after Harmar’s defeat, Simon Girty supplied the Indians with “great quantities of provisions” and ammunition. Matthew Elliott even possessed a boat named “Indian Feeder” (before he changed the name to the “Shawanoe,” a clear nod to the Shawnees). While the Western Confederacy awaited word from the American commissioners at Niagara, they received live cattle, bags of corn, and barrels of flour, peas, and pork given out at Alexander McKee’s storehouse.⁵⁵

These were items to please everyone: cattle for those invested in acquiring non-Native domesticates as property; ready-to-eat pork to cater to Indian meat preferences; and corn, always corn, to replace what the Indians had burned. Gifts of food gave British officials the confidence to counsel the Indians against treating with the Americans. McKee persuaded them not to go to meet the commissioners on June 1, the date initially fixed by the Americans. Later missives indicated that Simcoe “had positively said, That there would be no peace,” and that McKee had promised them food supplies “in case they went to war.”⁵⁶

After receiving the Confederacy’s negative response, the American commissioners gave up. Alexander McKee “ordered three Beeves to be killed in order to make a War feast.” A translator reported a Shawnee chief observing that now they would be ready for war, given the fact that McKee “sais we shall not want for Amunition Clothing or Provisions.” Alexander McKee provided both a present and future testament of British goodwill; he offered meat in preparation for war, as well as the promise of food to come. On August 23, 1793, Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph wrote to General Anthony Wayne and informed him that the meeting had failed. In September Henry Knox wrote to Wayne in hopes that his Legion would “be adequate to make those audacious savages feel our superiority in Arms.”⁵⁷

Wayne continued to focus on protecting his supply line, but he also tried to create divisions between Indians by fomenting accusations about poison; perhaps he hoped to reduce the number of enemies he would face in the field. In January 1794 a Seneca war chief named Captain Big Tree “put a period to his own existance” by committing suicide. Wayne tried to drive a wedge between the Iroquois (who had not yet declared for either side) and the Western Confederacy, which he did by implying that the Delawares had poisoned Captain Big Tree. In a talk sent to the Iroquois he observed that Captain Big Tree had engaged in “some Angry talk with the Delawares.” Whether he “eat or drank with them … or whether they gave him something, that put him out of his reason,” Wayne could not say.⁵⁸

Next, Wayne cast suspicions on the Miamis. He recalled hearing that the previous summer, many of the Six Nations died, “in consequence of Something that you had eat when at the Council with the Hostile Indians at the rapids of the Miami.” “This mode of Making war,” Wayne continued, “is Cowardly & base.” Wayne’s concept of victual warfare, then, approved of food spoilage but classified alleged poisoning as a dishonorable step too far. In spite of Wayne’s efforts, he worried that the loyalties of the Senecas remained “cool & backward.” Joseph Brant asked the Americans for more time before his Iroquois faction decided whether to support Britons or Americans. “In such very weighty business” it grew impossible to deliberate quickly, Brant claimed. By spring of 1794 Joseph Brant’s group had once more declared for war against the Americans. This unwillingness to betray the British may suggest the ineffectiveness of Wayne’s accusation. Wayne found the uncertainty exhausting. Writing to Henry Knox, he confessed, “it is a very unpleasant kind of Warfare … with famine & faction … altho’ I have hitherto sustained & halted all the attacks of this Hydra, yet I feel both body & mind fatigued by the Contest.”⁵⁹

The Western Confederacy’s numbers, meanwhile, had dwindled. Dragging Canoe’s death in 1792 dampened Chickamauga Cherokees’ resistance. In November of that year Chickamaugas, Creeks, and Shawnees struck Buchanan’s Station in Georgia, suffering defeat and significant casualties. In June 1794 the Confederacy mounted an attack against Fort Recovery that resulted in the shattering of their union. Testimony from a Potawatomi woman captured during the attack described 1,454 Chessaw, Delaware, Eel River, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Six Nations, and Wyandot warriors who had gathered outside the fort’s walls on June 30.⁶⁰ What the Shawnee Blue Jacket had envisioned as an ambush against a party of dragoons turned into a frontal assault led by the Ottawas. Indians attacked a convoy, stole the horses, and drove off the cattle. After failing to penetrate the fort, the Indians retreated beyond the line of fire, where they “killed & eat several Cattle & Packhorses” in sight of the garrison. They were preparing for a long journey, and thus a period of dearth. In late June the Ottawas headed home. The Ojibwas and Potawatomis followed them. By the time that Anthony Wayne built Fort Defiance at the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers—the former home of the Indians’ confederacy—Little Turtle had also relinquished his hopes of defeating the Americans. By August 1794, Blue Jacket presided over a heavily diminished force of only three hundred Delawares, one hundred Miamis, two hundred Shawnees, and one hundred other Indians of various tribal affiliations.⁶¹

The last military action of the war, the Battle of Fallen Timbers—so named because the ground was “cover’d with old fallen timber probably occasioned by a tornado”—commenced around 10 a.m. on the morning of August 20. Wayne’s Legion of three thousand soldiers fought for just over an hour before defeating the Confederacy. “It is with infinite pleasure that I now announce to you the brilliant success of the Federal Army under my Command,” bragged Wayne to Henry Knox, before devastating the surrounding countryside to ensure Natives’ total compliance. The engagement itself was less important in ensuring a lasting victory than Wayne’s postbattle vegetable warfare. Soldiers pulled up bean vines, cut pumpkins “to pieces,” and “destroyed all the Vegitables they could find.” For three days Americans wrecked houses and cornfields around the British-held Fort Miamis on the banks of the Maumee River. They laid “waste the villages & Corn fields for about Fifty miles on each side of the Miamis” and then headed toward the Auglaize River for more destruction.⁶²

The aftermath of Fallen Timbers was similar to revolutionary campaigns against the Cherokees and the Iroquois because in this instance British food diplomacy also became ineffective, but it was different because Indians did not try to alter diplomacy to maintain the alliance. Wayne urged his men to such devastation to “produce a conviction to the minds of the Savages, that the British have neither the power or inclination to afford them that protection which they had been taught to expect.” In some accounts Indians’ faith in the British broke during the battle, when British officials refused to fight or to shelter retreating Indians inside Fort Miamis after their defeat. In other interpretations the British refused to provide aid at all. In fact, Indians continued to accept provisions from British negotiators for months after the battle.⁶³ What did change was Natives’ behavior after receiving provisions—and this change was in keeping with changes in Iroquois, Creek, and Cherokee country.

Although British food diplomacy continued after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Indians behaved as if it was less powerful than it had been in the past. In October 1794 Governor Simcoe sent for Joseph Brant, Blue Jacket, Buckongahelas, Little Turtle, and Captain Johnny to ensure that they remained “well & regularly Supplied with provision.” Throughout the fall, winter, and following spring, British officials kept feeding them beef, butter, flour, peas, pork, and rice sent from Detroit via the Maumee River. When the Americans fixed on a time and date for a treaty with the Indians in June 1795, McKee and Elliott held “large Feasts, and Drunken parties daily in order to keep the Indians back from the treaty if possible.” These were the same practices that Britons used during the Revolution; they gave food to important leaders, they offered food to individuals, and they let the rum flow at key moments. And yet they failed to poison the Indians against the Americans; the Indians went to seek peace terms anyway.⁶⁴ Britons continued to provide provisions, but they lost the ability to offer advice that Indians would heed. Whereas in 1779 scorched Indian villages and a lack of British food aid maintained Indian alliances, in 1794 burned villages and generous British food aid lost them.

The following eighteen months witnessed the transfer of most non-Native political power from British to American hands in the northwest, and from Spanish to American hands in the southeast. In November 1794 John Jay’s treaty of friendship with Great Britain ensured Britons’ departure from the frontier. The United States would sign the Treaty of San Lorenzo, otherwise known as Pinckney’s Treaty, the following year—meaning that Creeks lost some Spanish support. In the interim the Western Confederacy sought terms. In April 1795 the Potawatomis delivered up prisoners in a demonstration of goodwill and asked for “something to eat, & not a little Keg, but a big one.” In May the Delawares appeared at Fort Defiance “almost Starved” and requested not only beef and corn but “a little Corn to plant,” or “seed Corn.” And Blue Jacket appeared to relinquish his British stipend to earn the Americans’ trust, and to promise to “Bring his Nation to Make a Village” near the Americans if they would “Supply them with Corn to plant.”⁶⁵ These appeals signified more than physical alimentary need—Delawares and Shawnees implied that they expected provisions but would also supplement American food aid with their own, useful agriculture. This compromise played into developing American ideas about Indians’ lack of “civility,” which would feature heavily in the 1790s and 1800s.

In the summer of 1795 over a thousand Indians assembled at Greenville, an imposing fort in present-day Ohio surrounded by beautiful meadows. On July 30 the Indians relinquished their claim to the Ohio River boundary line.⁶⁶ As Indians arrived they made it clear that they anticipated welcoming hospitality. Anthony Wayne, acting as treaty host, promised early arrivals “a little drink to wash the dust out of our throats … without however, passing the bounds of temperance and sobriety.” Perhaps worried that Wayne would stop with the welcoming drink, Le Gris, a Miami leader, told Wayne, “We expect to be treated as warriors.” “You have told us we should share your provisions whilst we stayed with you.” The Indians, he asserted, “would like some Mutton & pork.”⁶⁷ In depicting himself and his fellow men as soldiers, Le Gris set himself on a level with Wayne and demanded a fair share of meat. He asked for the non-Native protein Indians most preferred but also seemed willing to try other alternatives.

The Indians implied that failure to comply with their requests would result in a failed treaty. The Sun, a Potawatomi chief, complained, “we get but a small Allowance.” “We eat it in the morning and are hungry at night,” he said, indicating that Wayne was not showing enough generosity. “We become weary & wish for home,” he concluded. The Sun suggested that the Americans were willing to provide only the minimum of diplomatic concessions, but Indians expected the liberality of Americans’ British predecessors.⁶⁸

Wayne handled the situation by bending on issues of etiquette, making it clear that he remained in charge, and trying to foster dissension between Indians. He singled out the Sun by noting that he “alone complains of scarcity.” He asked those assembled “to consult generally,” and to let him know if they “really [did] not receive enough.” Pork, he responded, was unobtainable, so the Indians could have none of it. Mutton, he said, “are for the Comfort of our Sick,” and, on occasion, for the officers. Wayne acquiesced that sick Indians “shall most chearfully share” the sheep, and he would also “with pleasure” share a meal of mutton “with your Chiefs.” When Blue Jacket and his cohort arrived, Wayne warned them, “my plate and my table are not very large,” but he hoped “to see all your Chiefs in season and in due rotation.”⁶⁹ Wayne, by relegating sheep to officers and sick men, depriving the Indians of pork, and deciding when and how he would sup with the Indian chiefs, set the tone for future food diplomacy and thus for future U.S. Indian food policy.

The fact that the Indians agreed to Wayne’s terms suggests that to some degree even this newer, restrictive posture was successful. There is little evidence in the treaty record that other Native Americans complained about meals, provisions, or alcohol, and although treaty records are problematic, often incomplete documents, it seems odd that observers would have recorded one complaint but not others. Most of the Indians did not go on record to challenge the boundary line Wayne proposed. When Little Turtle said the cession the Americans claimed would “confine the hunting of our young men within limits too contracted,” Wayne ignored him. Indians nevertheless exhibited their disapproval in other ways—in fact, using one of the methods Wayne had earlier accused them of. Sixty Potawatomis died after the council, and although the Indians accused the Americans of poisoning their leaders, the British suspected that it was Native opponents of the treaty who had murdered those who had acceded to its terms.⁷⁰

After the overthrow of the Western Confederacy, the Americans sought to force peace with all remaining hostile tribes. The Southwestern Territorial militia struck a major blow against the Chickamauga Cherokee towns of Nickajack and Running Water in 1794. Wayne enjoyed success with the Cherokees in August 1795 after sending them a message that he had “signed and exchanged, Articles of a permanent peace” with the Western Confederacy. By September Wayne anticipated “the pleasing prospect of eating my Christmas dinner at Waynesborough,” in Pennsylvania; his job was done, but other work continued.⁷¹

U.S. commissioner Benjamin Hawkins, who would play a significant role revising Indian food policy, had begun to study Native Americans’ grievances. In a letter to George Washington he explained that after “the close of the war,” Americans deliberately forgot “the rights of the Indians … we seized on their lands, and made division of the same.” Land policy, he argued, was “the source of their hostility,” but he also observed that non-Native diplomats had promised and then failed to furnish the Indians with “such comforts as they had been accustomed to receive” from Britain.⁷² Hawkins was writing in 1792, not 1794 or 1795. He was describing the history of Indian affairs after the American Revolution, but the government’s quest for Native American land had not ceased by the end of the Western Confederacy War either. Hawkins seemed skeptical that U.S. land policy could ever favor Indians, but he hoped that some wrongs could be righted by reviving British forest diplomacy. That diplomacy included attempts to assuage Native hunger.

Yet there were numerous instances in the 1780s and 1790s when food appeared not to matter to Indians. Creeks at Colerain were unimpressed by Georgians’ claims that they were hungry. Shawnees and Miamis left Wayne’s provisions supplies lying in the road. The Iroquois chewed a root that allowed them to ignore hunger but also ate a lot at treaties. Attendees at Greenville complained about stinginess and then stopped complaining even in the face of reduced treaty hospitality. Non-Native observers largely sidestepped these moments to hone in on one organizing idea: the conviction that hungry Indians were violent people. Federal agents were paranoid about the consequences of Indian hunger, even when they misunderstood it. That fear was crucial to shaping an Indian policy that sought to prevent Indian hunger as it appeared to non-Natives, and this willingness made the federal government seem likelier to protect Indians’ interests at the expense of states’ rights. As had Creeks, Cherokees, and Iroquois before them, Western Confederacy Indians chose a combination of hunger and federal U.S. food aid by 1795.

Looking at these events reveals an additional battlefront: the tensions between Native and non-Native accounts of history. During the 1780s and 1790s, when power relations remained in flux, white negotiators experimented with using Native American approaches to interpreting the past. Federal officials rolled back some of the earlier British attempts to erase Native women’s presence at diplomatic meetings, acknowledged women’s history of shaping tribal decisions, and recorded interacting with them more frequently. Hawkins tried to learn where the United States had made mistakes. Georgian officials, despite their failure to get what they wanted at Colerain, still knew enough about Creek history to recognize that an oral speech could carry more legitimacy than a written one. When officials slipped up, non-Native leaders attacked their versions of history—as Red Jacket did when speaking to Timothy Pickering in 1791.

Native Americans were already staunch defenders of their own history and well on their way to winning battles against hunger when they wanted to wage them. British and American officials continued to consider Native American interests, but they worried less about the people of African descent who had fought for them during the war. Formerly enslaved people had gained a little power by fleeing from rebel American masters and turning into hunger creators and preventers. Next, they had to make it out of the former American colonies and to Nova Scotia. There, they experienced hunger that they would fail to master. Their fight against hunger had just begun—but luckily for historians they kept careful records of those struggles.