In the Bushes: The Secret History of Anglo-Iroquois Treaty Making

Abstract

The scion of a wealthy family from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Tench Tilghman had no previous experience in Native American diplomacy when the Continental Congress appointed him secretary for a delegation it sent to treat with the Haudenosaunee in 1775. He spent about a month in the Mohawk Valley and Albany on this mission, keeping a journal that detailed his experiences there.1 Tilghman was much more interested in recording his after-hours social life than anything related to the official proceedings. While much of what he wrote conveyed the snobbery that an eighteenth-century gentleman might have been expected to express about the people and living conditions he encountered in the backcountry, Tilghman also wrote with enthusiasm about some of the experiences associated with treaty making. He admired the manners exhibited by the chiefs he encountered, described in detail an Indian dance, and praised the singing he heard from Native women who had converted to Christianity. Growing frustrated at one point with the slow pace of the diplomatic negotiations that were the raison d’être for his trip, Tilghman wrote, “An Indian Treaty is by the by but dull entertainment owing to the delay and difficulty of getting what you say, delivered properly to the Indians.”2 Yet, the rest of his journal tells a different story: for a novice such as himself, a treaty conference was a singular kind of event that exposed participants to new sights and sounds and to an impressive cross section of Native and early American society. Treaty making of the kind Tilghman witnessed grew out of the Covenant Chain alliance between the Haudenosaunee (often referred to as the Six Nations or Iroquois in eighteenth-century documents) and the northern British colonies. Treaty conferences brought