Chapter Five:
New France, Part 2: The British
In the year 1662, King Charles II of England merged the "several lands, Islands, Places, Colonies, and Plantations" he claimed in the Connecticut River Valley, creating, "One Body Corporate and politique," and designating John Winthrop and his clique as "Governor and Company of the English colony of Connecticut in New‑England, in America." This charter, recognizing the place's isolation from other English colonies throughout the world, granted the men Charles had appointed broad powers to govern and trade in his name, and, probably more importantly, to possess the land and to pass it to their heirs. The borders of the colony were defined from the Narragansett Bay—now the heart of Rhode Island—north to the existing Massachusetts Colony, and "to the South Sea on the West Part," that is, across the vast continent all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This territory as defined by the Connecticut colonial charter of 1662 included that of Euclid Township, and all of the southern shore of Lake Erie besides.
These English claims conflicted with French claims. They also conflicted with the claims of other English colonies, not to mention the Natives', but no matter, since kings could draw lines on paper as they pleased. The Europeans barely knew what it was they were claiming, and the Natives didn't know they'd been claimed, nor likely would have cared if they had. The land belonged to those who stood upon it, and who could keep it.
The French continued their explorations of the Great Lakes, still looking for the water passage to Asia that neither they nor anyone else would ever find. Former Jesuit priest Rene‑Robert Cavelier de La Salle came to New France in 1667 to work with his brother. However he soon became obsessed with discovering the water route to China and set off in 1669 to find it on an expedition down the Ohio River that landed him on the future site of Louisville, Kentucky, instead. He went back to France, and returned in 1678 with a more ambitious plan. La Salle longed to sail a proper European vessel on the Great Lakes, but the significant barrier of Niagara Falls prevented ocean‑going ships from passing to the interior. In a massive logistical feat, La Salle and the men he employed hauled iron fittings, tools, canvas and five cannon up the Niagara escarpment and constructed a 50‑foot, 45‑ton frigate above the falls in 1679. La Salle named the vessel Griffon. It was the first sailing ship to travel on Lake Erie.
During this voyage, twenty‑three years after the destruction of the Erie, the Griffon passed along the southern shore of the lake and La Salle reported northern Ohio appeared unoccupied. Griffon sailed on to Lake Huron and Lake Michigan before it wrecked. The wreck of the Griffon, lost more than three centuries at this writing, is the Holy Grail of Great Lakes marine archeologists today. The expedition pressed forward without the ship, down the Illinois River to the Mississippi, arriving at the Gulf of Mexico in 1682, at which point La Salle claimed the vast Louisiana territory encompassing the heart of North America for France.
LaSalle returned to the Gulf of Mexico three years later, intending to locate the Mississippi again and sail up the river from the opposite direction. Poor maps and primitive navigation however landed him far to the west of his target, in present-day Texas. One of the actual ships of this voyage, La Belle, was located after 310 years in the shallow waters of Matagorda Bay, southwest of Houston, in 1995, and excavated by the Texas Historical Commission. France asserted and its claim to ownership of the wreck was recognized in 2003, and it is officially property of the French Musée National de la Marine in Paris. But La Belle and her artifacts will remain in trust of the Texas Historical Commission for 99 years, and are currently on display and the subject of ongoing study at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin. It's likely similar arrangements will have to be discussed should Griffon ever re-appear. As to the Mississippi expedition, it was disastrous. La Salle's men grew desperate and turned on each other, and finally on their commander, executing him with a shot to the head at close range in March 1687. La Salle never found the Pacific.
Fourteen years later, Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe Cadillac, for whom the Michigan city and the automobile are named, passed through Lake Erie with a force of soldiers and colonists to construct a fort on the straights—the French word for "straights" is "detroit"—at the west end of Lake Erie commanding the passage to the western Great Lakes. The founding of Detroit in 1701 marked the establishment of the western first of two poles, between which the fate of Euclid Township would be determined. The eastern pole, an even more inaccessible frontier outpost, would emerge several decades later, and would involve the French as well.
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While Ireland had been within the English political sphere since the time of Henry VIII, and England had absorbed Wales as far back as the 13th century, in 1707 the Act of Union merged the Kingdom of England with the yet independent Kingdom of Scotland, creating a single political entity thereafter known as the Kingdom of Great Britain. And although governed from London in England, England's North American colonies had since the time of Jamestown and Plymouth in fact become more broadly British than just merely English. In the 18th century these united nations of the British Isles set about building the British Empire.
Toward the mid‑1700s northern Ohio began to get crowded again, relatively speaking. Natives returned circa 1740 when members of the Ottawa and Huron tribes found their way into the area. As more and more English filtered into the region the name Wyandot became increasingly common when referring to the Huron. The French preferred the former appellation, the English the latter, but both names referred to the same tribe, formerly from north of the Great Lakes but pushed south and west by the Iroquois in the Beaver Wars. The French established numerous missions and trading posts in the Great Lakes region throughout the early 1700s. One French trader named Sieur de Saguin maintained one on the Cuyahoga River, which he first set up in 1742. A 1755 map of the region shows his outpost on the Cuyahoga as "French House."
The French may have known about Euclid Creek and named it. A map by Thomas Hutchins published in London in 1778 clearly identifies the "Cayahoga" River and the Chagrin, or Riviere Shaguin, named for Sieur de Saguin already mentioned. Between these two bodies is depicted a "Riviere a Roche," or "River of Boulders," and although one cannot be entirely certain it's Euclid Creek from the detail of the map, it is unlikely the cartographer would have recorded the smaller Nine Mile Creek or Dugway Brook while omitting the larger Euclid Creek. It could also be Doan Brook further west; the beds of both streams are certainly strewn with boulders. But this is unlikely, as Connecticut Land Company employee Myron Holley's 1796 journal entry from the initial survey of the area describes Euclid Creek as "considerably larger" than Doan Brook, and, again, it's unlikely the cartographer would omit the larger creek for the smaller. So perhaps the French first gave what is now called Euclid Creek a name of their own.
Another trader, an Irishman named George Croughan, established a second trading post at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River around 1745, the first permanent White settlement on the future site of the City of Cleveland. These two, Saguin and Croughan, ostensible subjects of the French and British empires respectively, living in close proximity and competing for the same resources just about five miles from what would become Euclid Township, offer a microcosm of the conflict that was soon to erupt between the two empires and engulf the Lake Erie frontier and the eastern half of the North American continent, not to mention all of Europe and much of the world.
Around this same time traders from the British colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia began to appear on lands claimed by the French in the upper Ohio Valley. This situation soon deteriorated into a dispute between the British and the French over who had the right to claim and settle the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, a region soon to become known as the Ohio Country. The French claimed the area by dint of exploration and conversion of the Natives; the English, particularly Virginians, claimed it by colonial charter. The French attempted to expel all British from the region in 1749, without success. Shifting Indian alliances increased the tensions. In London members of the cabinet advocated war with France under the terms of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which named the Iroquois British subjects, arguing that the lands the Iroquois had conquered in the Beaver Wars, lands which included the future Euclid Township, had been conquered by proxy for the British Crown, and claiming that the French in the Ohio Country had therefore invaded the British colony of Virginia.
In 1753 the French constructed two forts in territory British Virginia believed to be its own near the south shore of Lake Erie on the Riviere aux Boeuf, near the site of present-day Waterford, Pennsylvania, and garrisoned them with 1,500 troops. Virginia dispatched a young and untested militia major named George Washington to insist they leave. His expedition departed the Virginia capital at Williamsburg at the end of October of that year for the interior, pausing along the way to survey a promising place for a frontier fort at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, where they met and formed the Ohio. Washington's troop arrived at Fort le Boeuf in mid-December. The commander there, Legardeur de Saint Pierre Repentigny, received Maj. Washington's message but informed the young officer that he would not comply with the demand to abandon the forts. Saint Pierre Repentigny did promise however to deliver his message to the Governor of New France, the Marquis Duquesne, and with that sent Washington off back to coastal Virginia.
Upon his return home in January 1754, Washington reported to the House of Burgesses, the governing parliamentary body of the Virginia colony, on his dealings with the French at Fort Le Boeuf. Eager to limit and to counter what the British Virginians considered French encroachments, Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie moved quickly to fund, raise and equip a force to send against them, and promoted Washington to lieutenant colonel. Armed Virginia workmen trekked to the interior and began construction of a forward base at the strategic river confluence at the forks of the Ohio surveyed earlier that winter, which they took to calling Fort Prince George for King George II's son, soon, though unbeknownst to any of them, to ascend his father's throne.
This frontier fort was the embryo of the modern city of Pittsburgh. And also unbeknownst to any of the men hacking the redoubt from the forest this site would become the center of American power in the region, locked in a deadly grasp with the fort at Detroit, perennially enemy‑held, for the next 60 years. The contest between forces based at the several incarnations of Pittsburgh and those at Detroit would hold the key to the fate of Euclid Township. But it didn't begin that way. In April 1754, 500 French troops attacked and captured the unfinished and so still vulnerable fort. They then completed its construction and called their new strategic base Fort Duquesne.
On the march toward Fort Prince George from Virginia in May, Lt. Col. Washington would receive two bits of news. The first was of the fall of Fort Prince George to the French. The second was of his commander, Col. Joshua Fry, being thrown from his horse and killed. The war was now Washington's. He was in command.
On May 28 Washington's troop attacked a small contingent of French southwest of the newly christened Fort Duquesne. One French soldier escaped and ran for the fort with news of the approaching enemy force. Rightly fearing an immediate counterattack, Washington ordered the hasty construction of a small stockade he called Fort Necessity. The expected attack did come, on July 3, when more than 1,000 French soldiers and their Indian allies attacked the tiny British Virginian fort, with the French commander offering gentlemanly terms for capitulation after several hours of fighting. No war had been officially declared between the two European empires. The Virginians would be allowed to march home to the coast. Washington knew the vastly superior enemy force would slaughter his men if he resisted. He accepted the terms and surrendered his small fort, ironically, it would later turn out, on the fourth of July. The inexperienced and bested Washington bore the blame for the failed expedition upon his return to the Virginia capital two weeks later. Disgraced, Washington resigned his commission. It must have seemed like the end of his military career to the ambitious former officer. But the reader is undoubtedly aware that public life held more in store for Lt. Col. Washington. And he would personally figure again and again in the fate of what would become Euclid Township.
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In the summer of 1754 a lieutenant in the French army named Joseph Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery traveled in a group of 285 men in 27 canoes from the French fort at Presque Isle, present-day Erie, Pennsylvania, on a mission to reinforce the garrison at Fort Detroit. De Lery kept a journal of the journey in which is preserved the first record of a complete transit of the south shore of Lake Erie. In it he described an encounter with a Huron Indian in the area of Euclid Township, somewhere between the marsh near present-day Mentor, Ohio, and the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. De Lery also described the lake and the adjacent land and wildlife in the vicinity of Euclid Township as he observed it over two and a half centuries ago:
"Wednesday [July 31, 1754], we were detained by a strong northeast wind. At seven o'clock in the morning, a Huron savage came to see the commander, who gave him a drink of brandy and a white blanket. Afterward, we told him the news of Belle Riviere [one French name for the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, the site of Fort Duquesne], that the English were no longer there, and how they had been driven away. He seemed delighted at what we told him, and asked where we were going. We told him we were going to Detroit and Michillimaquinac [Mackinaw, Michigan] to attend to Onontio's [the French king's] affairs, to carry his message, with clothes for the women, children and warriors, and to have them drink a draught of milk from their father. He seemed disappointed that he was not going with us to the fete. He promised to bring us deer the next day, which he said were plentiful in the forest. I took a walk in the beautiful wood which borders the lake, about fifteen to twenty arpents [about half a mile] from the shore. Beyond the wood are almost impassible swamps and prairies. I killed a rattlesnake, which was not as large as those found at Riviere at Chicotte [near Montreal], at the source of Lake Champlain. At 9 o'clock in the evening the wind abated, but the lake was still so rough no one could have gone out on it, even for the most urgent business, for fear of tipping over."
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The undeclared war between the superpowers continued through the rest of 1754. The French consolidated their hold on the southern shore of Lake Erie that year with the construction of a fort at Sandusky. With what today appears the glacial pace of mid‑18th century military maneuver, the French reinforced Quebec the following summer with 6,000 fresh troops.
Meanwhile King George II of England appointed Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock supreme commander of the British North American forces. Braddock met in war council with the colonial governors in Alexandria, Virginia, where he presented his strategy for dislodging the French from their strongholds with simultaneous attacks on three fronts. He tasked Massachusetts troops with securing the portage between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario by seizing the French fort at Niagara. A second wing would take control of the water highway from the English stronghold of New York to Quebec through Lake Champlain, controlled by Fort Frederick at Crown Point in what is now upstate New York. The third, under Braddock's personal command, with a re-instated Washington serving as his aide, would retake Fort Duquesne.
Braddock mustered his force at Fort Cumberland inland on the Potomac River in Maryland. Short of supplies from the beginning they set out toward Fort Duquesne, cutting a road through the forest as they marched. Braddock split his force to pick up the pace of progress, sending the bulk of the men, who could weave between the trees, ahead of the supply wagons, which needed the road to make the journey. Native scouts alerted their French allies to the approaching British force. They set an ambush for Braddock and waited. He tripped the French trap on the north bank of the Monongahela about ten miles east of Fort Duquesne, at a place now called Braddock, Pennsylvania. The vanguard of the British force took heavy losses at the front of the column. The survivors panicked and ran. When they reached the main body of British troops the panic spread and Braddock was unable to restore discipline. He personally led a charge into the French line and was fatally shot. The attack on Fort Duquesne failed. The British force retreated back to Fort Cumberland, then all the way to Philadelphia. Braddock died of his wound four days later.
News of the defeat caused a rash of desertions in the British force moving from Albany on Fort Niagara and Gen. William Shirley, who led the Niagara troop, decided to postpone his attack until the following spring. At Crown Point the British inflicted heavier losses on the French, but failed to drive their enemies from Lake Champlain. The following year the British attempted an assault on Nova Scotia in order to take control of the entrance to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the vital Saint Lawrence Valley, essentially the whole of New France. The attacks failed, and in early fall storms destroyed a large portion of the British North American fleet.
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But British luck began to change in 1758. They regrouped and renewed their attack on Nova Scotia, winning an important victory with the capture of the strategic city of Louisbourg on July 26 of that year. More importantly perhaps, the slow attrition of war whittled down the French fleet protecting New France from the sea, leaving Britain with a maritime supremacy that would last through the end of the war. Later that summer the British scored a coup with the capture of Fort Frontenac, at what is now Kingston, Ontario, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, at which were stored large caches of supplies and ammunition intended for Fort Niagara and the keystone outpost of Fort Duquesne.
The French began to pull back, abandoning Lake Champlain to the British and withdrawing to their strongholds on the Saint Lawrence of Montreal and Quebec. The British under Gen. John Forbes and Lt. Col. Henry Bouquet moved once again on Fort Duquesne, but instead of attacking the fort straight on the British commanders sat down for nearly three weeks with representatives of the various Indian tribes allied with the French to negotiate. On October 21 the Iroquois, Shawnee and Delaware Indians proclaimed friendship and peace with the English, withdrawing their support from the French garrison holed up within the strategic but isolated fort. Upon receipt of the dire news the French hurriedly dismantled their defenses and abandoned Fort Duquesne, and when Forbes and Bouquet began their attack on November 25, 1758, they found the stockade empty. British troops raised their flag above the fort at dawn and renamed it Fort Pitt, for William Pitt the Elder, the British Secretary of State who vigorously pursued the far off war with France in the American wilderness from the floor of the House of Commons in London. The British had gained the momentum in the war, and that momentum would continue.
In 1759 British troops marched up the Mohawk Valley and took Fort Stanwix, at what is now Rome, New York, Fort Oswego at Oswego, and Fort Niagara at Niagara Falls. Along with the capture of Fort Duquesne these victories gave them effective control of the Western frontier. The French, realizing how untenable their positions south of Lakes Ontario and Erie had become, abandoned Presque Isle and Fort Le Boeuf, where the war had begun, and withdrew to Fort Detroit. The British occupied the abandoned French forts and turned their attention north through the Hudson Valley, a water expressway pointed straight at the heart of New France. After capturing Fort Ticonderoga, and the old prize of Fort Frederick at Crown Point, they moved on Quebec, and took the city in the climactic battle of the war in North America. The following year the French tried to re‑take Quebec but failed. Then British forces surrounded Montreal in September 1760 and, facing a slaughter, the French commander of the garrison humanely surrendered it without a fight.
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An expedition led by English Maj. Robert Rogers, commander of a group of backwoods soldiers from Massachusetts called the Rangers, traveled by boat along the south shore of Lake Erie in November 1760 to take possession of Fort Detroit, which had been surrendered by the French following the fall of Montreal but remained yet unoccupied. Rogers' main command traveled by boat, with an accompanying expedition under Capt. David Brewer following along by land, driving oxen along the way, almost surely along the lakeshore trail which is now Euclid Avenue. Rogers' journal of the expedition included his own description, this one from the English vantage, of the south shore of Lake Erie, a taste of what the first American settlers would find when they arrived in Euclid Township a generation later:
"The land in the South Side of Lake Erie from Presqu'isle [sic] puts on a very fine Appearance. The Country is level, the Timber tall, and of the best Sort. Oak, Hickory and Locust. It is well Watered and for Game, both as to plenty and Variety, exceeded by no part of the world."
The French made a final attack on the British in Newfoundland in September 1762, but with the surrender of Fort Detroit nearly two years earlier the French and Indian War in North America had for all intents and purposes already ended. Fighting continued for a time in the Caribbean before a final peace concluded the war by a treaty negotiated in Paris and signed at Versailles on February 10, 1763. With it Old France ceded New France to Great Britain and all her North American possessions east of the Mississippi, thus bringing what became Euclid Township into the English‑speaking world.
But Great Britain would not hold on to it for long.
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There is a violent epilogue to the French and Indian War in the Ohio Country.
The Europeans made their peace with each other back in Europe in early 1763, and the Indians who had fought alongside the French did not figure into their calculations. In the Ohio Country the Natives realized that the defeat of the French meant that their European ally would abandon them. Little now stood in the way of White settlers swarming into the West.
During the war a Delaware named Neolin preached among the Indians of the Ohio Country, encouraging them to turn away from things European. Neolin saw the disparate tribes as a single Native people and told them that their interaction with and dependence on European goods and clothes and practices were the root causes of what had become the Indians' misery. Among Neolin's followers was an Ottawa chief called Pontiac, for whom the Michigan city and the automobile are named. In response to the threat the peace of 1763 represented to the Ohio Country Natives, Pontiac bound them together and rallied them against the victorious British.
In May 1763 Pontiac and his followers attacked the British garrison at Fort Detroit, signaling the opening of a rising of Ottawa, Potawatomi, Munsee, Chippewa/Ojibwa, Wyandot/Hurons, Delaware, Shawnee, Kickapoo and Wabash Indians throughout the entire vast region south of the Great Lakes. The British forts controlling lakeshore Ohio at Sandusky and Presque Isle fell, along with Fort Le Boeuf, and Fort Venango inland from Presque Isle, plus Fort Mackinaw on the strategic straight between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
The British soldiers and settlers who believed that the danger on the frontier was French and had passed with the recent end of the war were caught completely off their guard, and fled in panic that summer to, what they hoped would be, some vainly, the safety of the nearest forts, as one by one Natives of different tribes attacked in concert all over the frontier, killing any White settlers they found and burning their crops and cabins. The assault on Detroit failed to take the fort. Likewise for the moves against Forts Pitt, Ligonier and Bedford in present-day Pennsylvania.
The British regrouped and counterattacked from their remaining strongholds the following summer. A force under Henry Bouquet, a full colonel by then, left Fort Pitt in late July heading east, and proceeded on to Ligonier, deploying forward scouts ahead of his main force to prevent ambush. The force was attacked on August 5 at Bushy Run, near today's Jeannette, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh, but the British repulsed the Natives in a two day battle before returning to Fort Pitt on August 10.
At the same time English Col. John Bradstreet led a relief expedition west to Detroit, breaking the Indian siege there. From Detroit Bradstreet continued his march, reclaiming the forts commanding Mackinaw, Green Bay and Sault Ste. Marie The force returned east toward Fort Niagara in the fall via the southern shore of Lake Erie, regaining Sandusky on the way. At the Rocky River a storm wrecked most of the expedition's boats, forcing a march along the rugged lakeshore passing through the north end of what would become Euclid Township. The difficulty of making the journey on foot through swamps, underbrush and rushing rivers claimed the lives of several men that battle did not before the troop finally arrived at Niagara on November 4, 1764.
Bouquet's and Bradstreet's expeditions subdued the uprising. Pontiac evaded capture until 1766, but was freed after he swore never to make war on the British again. He lived quietly on the Maumee near what is today Toledo for three years until he was killed by another Indian, one possibly paid by the British for having made war against them, or possibly in the service of the Indians for having made peace with the British.
Pontiac's death did not mark the last time Natives would unite and rise against the Whites in the Ohio Country. And if the Anglo‑American settlers there were wary of the area's Natives before the rising led by Pontiac, they loathed them after. More blood would be shed.
The Indians of Ohio would never again fight the British. After Pontiac's War they would, ironically, come to see the British as their protectors and allies and turn their ire against a more immediate threat: Virginians and Pennsylvanians. Americans.
The information in Chapter Five is drawn from the following sources:
Charter of Connecticut 1662, text. Yale University website. www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/states/ct03.htm
Chaussegros de Lery, Joseph Gaspard. Journal of Chaussegros de Lery. Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1940.
Rogers, Robert. Journal of Robert Rogers, The Ranger on his Expedition for Receiving the Capitulation of Western French Posts (October 20, 1760 to February 14, 1761). New York Public Library, 1933.
Schwartz, Seymour I. The French and Indian War, 1754-1763, The Imperial Struggle for North America. Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website
ech.cwru.edu
Ohio Historical Society website
ohiohistory.org
Virtual Museum of New France, Canadian Museum of History website
historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france